Brian Burns becomes the latest to try to revive Giants' legacy of ferocious pass-rushers
Panthers linebacker Brian Burns walks off the field after losing to the Packers during an NFL game on Dec. 24, 2023, in Charlotte, N.C. Credit: AP/Jacob Kupferman
Say all you want about quarterbacks and running backs and offensive linemen and their importance to a team’s ability to score points and win games. Yeah, of course they matter. In today’s NFL more than ever.
But for the Giants, throughout most of their recent history at least, the glamor position has lined up on the other side of the ball, coiled and ready to pounce on opposing passers and ball-carriers like ferocious felines out in the wild, a crazed look in their eyes, an unstoppable desire to wreak havoc on opposing teams.
From Lawrence Taylor to Michael Strahan to Osi Umenyiora and Justin Tuck and Jason Pierre-Paul, those hunters have been the core of any semblance of winning football this franchise has enjoyed. It’s no wonder, then, that while most of the past decade has been spent trying to find the next in that once unbroken lineage of seekers-and-destroyers, the team as a whole has struggled to come close to the kind of success those players produced.
Now it’s Brian Burns’ turn to try to pick up the legacy.
If he can manage to do it, if he can be the Pro Bowl-talent he was during his first four years in the NFL with the Panthers, if he can come close to being worth the draft picks the Giants are sending to Carolina (a second-rounder this year and a fifth-rounder next year) plus the five-year $150 million contract he will soon be signing, then Burns has a chance to become something the Giants haven’t had on the edge of their defense for quite some time.
He will become the next New York superstar.
That’s something Olivier Vernon and Robert Ayers and Markus Golden and all the other guys the Giants tried to cram into that role failed to achieve. They may not have always been terrible, but they weren’t transcendent. And the draft picks the Giants have thrown at this issue over the years? Most of them have become cautionary tales rather than legends, although the book is still out on Kayvon Thibodeaux's place in that spectrum.
Burns, though, has the opportunity to not only lift Thibodeaux’s game — those two with Dexter Lawrence between them have the chance to be one of the more menacing defensive fronts in the game — but his own stature. Any shred of anonymity he enjoyed (or perhaps tolerated) toiling in Carolina is about to be lost, whether he recognizes it or not. He’s coming to the Big Town, on the Big Contract, and playing the Big Role.
The Giants obviously believe he can do it. Burns becomes the first huge, tenure-defining outside acquisition for general manager Joe Schoen. If Burns comes up shy of expectations, it will be a big black eye for Schoen.
If he exceeds them? Both will reap the benefits and the adulations.
New York, more than most sports cities, for whatever the reason, is drawn to gritty, nasty defenses. That’s certainly the case in hockey and basketball, and football follows those same proclivities. We take enormous pride in stopping others, in shutting them down, more so than we appreciate simply outscoring or out-finessing them. It’s a hard place to live, work or play, and every attempt to step forward is a fight fraught with risk. Players who stand strong, who protect, who are bulwarks, are the ones we identify with most closely.
Maybe that is something Schoen has learned about the area since his arrival a little over two years ago. Maybe that is why his first bank-breaker of a swing was for the position that holds more lore in the team’s history than any other. Or maybe he just sees what is happening in the league these days and recognizes that there are three keys to winning: Having a quarterback, protecting a quarterback, and sacking a quarterback. He has Andrew Thomas to do the protecting. We’ll see where he truly stands on the current state of quarterback play on his roster by the end of April. And now he’s added Burns to do the sacking.
Burns, who will turn 26 next month, who has 46 career sacks, who according to NextGen stats, has racked up 148 “quick pressures” since 2019, more than anyone else in the league other than Myles Garrett, Aaron Donald and T.J. Watt, has the chance to become one of the elite sentries the city adores so much.
Or he can join the growing list of those unable to live up to the calling and quickly expelled.
It’s a lot to ask of anyone, to pick up a nearly doused torch that goes back more than four decades now, to reignite the smoldering remnant of its flame, and become the next bearer of a standard that has put two players in Canton, a half dozen in the team’s Ring of Honor, not to mention the deliverance of four Super Bowl titles.
That’s the real deal Burns accepted, not the $150 million one. Whether he recognizes it or not now, he will soon.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
