Giants targeted Darren Waller well before acquiring the tight end

PHOENIX — The Giants had Darren Waller in blue before they ever thought about trading for him.

The front office rates each player in the league on a color scale, a shorthand which allows them to converse quickly regarding different skill levels. Those hues represent different categories such as quality starter, dependable backup, ascending talent with high ceiling.

And then there is the top of the list, the elite, the Pro Bowl-level players.

Waller was in that blue man group.

“He’s an offensive weapon,” general manager Joe Schoen said on Tuesday at the NFL’s annual league meetings of the tight end acquired via trade from the Raiders this month. “To me he’s a blue player. He’ll be an asset for our offense.”

Schoen’s job is just to assemble the talent, though. The man who has to make it all work, put the players together to form a team, is coach Brian Daboll. He too is excited about adding Waller to an offense that for most of last season lacked a legitimate playmaker in the passing game.

In fact, Daboll said since the trade he’s been scribbling out personnel groupings and plays involving Waller that the Giants simply did not have the capacity to run in 2022.

“I have a lot of drawings on the board right now,” he said at the NFC coaches breakfast on Tuesday. “He’s a pretty unique player… We just have to get him into the building and start working with him in terms of learning our stuff. But he’s a talented player.”

The Giants aren’t brainstorming from scratch on this. While last year’s Giants and many of the successful Bills teams Daboll coached before them did not have dynamic tight ends, he did come up through the ranks working with that position and was part of Patriots teams that relied heavily on Rob Gronkowski as a receiver. Offensive coordinator Mike Kafka undoubtedly has entire chapters of his playbook from Kansas City that revolve around a tight end such as Travis Kelce, which he was unable to utilize in his first season in New York.

“That’s your job as a coaching staff is to figure out who you have, move the pieces around, and play with the guys you have,” Daboll said. “You can have a lot of different personnel groups throughout a year. That’s what all this in the spring and training camp will be for . . . [The Raiders] lined him up in different spots. He’s worked under some different coaches. Whatever we feel is best for him and us, that’s what we’ll try to do.”

The trade, in which the Giants sent a third-round pick to the Raiders, started with somewhat casual chats between Schoen and Las Vegas general manager David Ziegler at the Senior Bowl and further talks at the Combine.

“We just had some general conversations like, ‘Hey, anybody on your team who may be available?’ ” Schoen said. “Waller was a name that came up that we were interested in, and we continued those talks when we came back. After doing a little bit of research and coming to an agreement on his value, we went ahead and pulled the trigger.”

The Giants received a player who, when he was fully healthy in 2019 and 2020, averaged 98.5 catches and 1,168 receiving yards per season with 12 total touchdowns during that span. Injuries limited him to only 20 games the last two seasons during which he caught a combined 83 passes for 1,053 yards, but the Giants believe he can regain his status as one of the top receiving threats in the league.

That, ultimately, is what they wanted to give Daniel Jones. With few top-tier receivers available, the Giants decided to add a tight end instead.

“You have a free agency cycle, you have players available for trade, and you have a draft,” Schoen said. “So where can we find a player that has a dynamic skill set that can help us? Waller was one of those players we found out was available, did our research on him, and the value met what we were willing to pay.”

They didn’t care what position the player is listed on the roster as, just as long as the color was a perfect match.