Giants need a WR to step up and share load with Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley
Kenny Golladay of the Giants lines up during the first quarter against the Cowboys at MetLife Stadium on Sept. 26. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The Giants came into this season wondering what they would be able to get from Saquon Barkley and Daniel Jones.
Roughly halfway through, they have been overjoyed to find out it’s just about everything they could have imagined. Barkley and Jones are playing at some of the highest levels of their careers, and their production has helped carry the team to its best start in a decade.
It may be going too well for the overall good of the Giants. They have become a top-heavy offense, with Barkley and Jones accounting for a combined 1,331 of the team’s 2,702 rushing and receiving yards (and considering Jones can’t very well throw passes to himself for receiving yards, that nearly 50% between the two of them is even more unbalanced).
The rest of the league has noticed it as well.
Not every team has the physical ability to stop them, certainly, but as the back end of the schedule starts to rise in difficulty and the Giants face more teams not just determined to but able to key on those two main production pieces, wins are likely to become tougher and tougher to come by.
There will be times when the Giants will be able to overpower opponents, bludgeon them with Barkley and juke them with Jones. But such exercises will become futile against a higher-quality opponent.
Sunday was an illustration of what the Giants look like when those two players are neutralized. It wasn’t very appealing.
With the Seahawks determined to stop Barkley from running and to keep Jones from using his deft fake handoffs before keeping the ball himself and running with it, the offense had no one else on whom to rely. The result was their fewest points and fewest yards of the season and a handy blueprint for their opponents in the next nine games to follow.
As the Giants go into this bye week, they simply must find another player they can turn to in such sticky situations. If they cannot, the second half of this season is going to look a lot like it did Sunday in Seattle. Blech.
That could mean a deal, most likely for a wide receiver. The Giants just traded one away in Kadarius Toney, but there is the potential for them to add a new target in the passing game before Tuesday’s deadline. Plenty are said to be available.
However, unless general manager Joe Schoen thinks the team is one move away from contending for a title — and from all indications, he does not — he’s more than likely to wait for the offseason before making a big rebuilding push on the roster.
Any answers, therefore, must come from within. Problem is, there isn’t much within to look to.
This is a team so devoid of reliable talent at receiver that Sterling Shepard is tied for second among those at his position for most passing targets this season, only two behind the leader in that category.
What’s so wrong with that? Shepard played in only three games after coming back from an Achilles injury and hasn’t been on the field in more than a month after tearing his ACL on Sept. 26.
The closest thing the Giants have to a top receiver lately has been Darius Slayton, back in the good graces of the offense after starting the season on the bench. He’s caught 15 passes for 221 yards in the last four games. That’s good considering the company he keeps. It’s not enough to scare opposing teams into coming off their philosophies of stopping Barkley and Jones from wrecking the game, though.
So who can do it? Kenny Golladay? Maybe. He likely has just a few months left in his Giants tenure to try to come close to living up to the ballyhoo and contract that accompanied him when he arrived as a free agent a year ago.
When he spoke last week, he seemed eager and motivated to do that, but he hasn’t reached the end zone since he joined the Giants and there is no indication that he still has the ability to do so even when he comes back from a knee injury that has sidelined him the past three games.
Wan’Dale Robinson? The rookie flashes, but he also disappears just as quickly. After a strong start against Jacksonville, he was a non-factor in the second half, and the Giants couldn’t get him the ball in Seattle.
Richie James? David Sills? Marcus Johnson? They make the occasional play but they definitely are not playmakers.
It likely will come down to Brian Daboll and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka spending this week scheming up ways to squeeze even more from their puckered-up roster than they already have.
The players have been given a week off for the bye. The coaches will stay behind. They’ll spend the next few days trying to figure out better ways to deploy the pieces they have at their disposal, work around shortcomings the Giants knowingly accepted on this team when they set out on the 2022 campaign, and sprinkle some magic X & O dust on as many of the mediocre supporting players as they can.
The running back and quarterback no longer are question marks, and that’s exciting. Now the Giants need to find a way to make someone else into an exclamation point.
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.
