Tom Rock: Jets' David Bailey, Giants' Arvell Reese will always be compared to one another now
From left: Jets No. 2 overall pick David Bailey of Texas Tech and Giants No. 5 overall selection Arvell Reese of Ohio State. Credit: Ed Murray; Noah K. Murray
The first and biggest debate of the NFL Draft was seemingly resolved on Thursday night when the Jets, free to decide between two of the top defensive players in the entire process with the second overall pick, chose David Bailey over Arvell Reese.
“Both of those guys are really good players,” Jets coach Aaron Glenn said of the decision. “Arvell's going to have a really good career in this league. But when you continue to evaluate those guys, we just felt like Bailey fit us better. He fit us.”
That settled that.
Well, not really. Not around here anyway.
Because that call created a scenario which no one saw coming, the least of whom were the Giants. It left Reese on the board, and after the Cardinals and Titans both opted to go with offensive players, the Giants, with the fifth overall pick, couldn’t believe their luck. They had Reese scouted as their top non-quarterback in the entire class and suddenly he was available to them. It took mere moments for them to turn in their card and select him.
So the debate will now continue, not through mock drafts and scouting reports and projections by pundits, but on the turf at MetLife Stadium that both of the young men will now call their home. For the next few years at least, and probably for the rest of their careers, they will be linked and compared to each other as fanbases of the two local teams jostle over who got the better of the picks.
Bailey and Reese hardly know each other. They played at different colleges in different parts of the country.
"He seemed like a guy who keeps to himself, kind of like me,” Reese said of their brief pre-draft interactions on Friday when he was at the Giants’ facility in East Rutherford. “I shook his hand a couple times.”
They have different character arcs and backgrounds that brought them to the Big Apple. Reese was a four-star recruit who made an immediate impact at Ohio State; Bailey was a late bloomer who spent three meh seasons at Stanford before graduating early and transferring to Texas Tech, where he flourished.
“My approach to the game completely changed and I did a complete 180,” Bailey said of what spurred the change in him from those early days while speaking at Jets HQ in Florham Park at about the same time Reese was talking on Friday, about a half hour drive away. “The disappointment I felt in myself and the disappointment I felt in my team.”
They are both technically listed as linebackers, but they don’t even play the same position when looked at more closely. Bailey is a speedster who whips high around blockers and is a proven quarterback hunter; he was tied for the FCS lead with 14.5 sacks at Texas Tech last season. Reese is a freakish ballhawk who can be an edge rusher when needed but that won’t be his primary job as the Giants intend to start him as an off-the-ball player. As coach John Harbaugh said: “He'll be in the A gap, the B gap, the C gap, the D gap, off the edge . . . He'll be moving around with all of our guys.”
On that basic difference the two players wholeheartedly agree.
“I would say that, yeah,” Bailey offered on the topic.
Said Reese on if there are on-field similarities between the two: “I don’t think so.”
In reality they should have very little at all to do with each other moving forward.
Too bad. This is the way it is going to be.
They won’t be the first to go through this with the Giants and Jets. Perhaps the most recent case was in 2020 when the two teams used first-round picks to select offensive tackles. The Giants took Andrew Thomas fourth overall, the Jets went with Mekhi Becton at 11. We know who won that one.
There was also a link between the team’s two picks when they selected second and third overall in the 2018 draft. The Giants took Saquon Barkley and the Jets went with Sam Darnold. The winner in that? Well, it turned out to be the Eagles and Seahawks who have won the past two Super Bowls with those players. We’ll just be generous and call that a draw.
The fact is these two teams that share New York have been jostling just about every draft since they started divvying up the area’s fanbase. It goes all the way back to when they weren’t even in the same league. In 1965 the Giants and Jets each had the first overall pick in their respective drafts. The Giants took Tucker Frederickson, the running back from Auburn, at the top of the NFL’s selection process. He had an injury-shortened career but even if he had stayed completely healthy he was never going to measure up to the player the Jets took first overall in the AFL draft: Joe Namath.
Now Bailey and Reese will fall into these familiar roles as rivals and foes who will be measured against each other even if they never actually play against each other.
Week by week we’ll be watching to see who develops, who produces, who lives up to their billing, and who does not. That will last for a while.
The Jets and Giants each got the defender they wanted the most on Thursday night.
Now we get to see if either of them got it right.
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.
