Giants show off unique late-game defensive alignment in preseason matchup with Bengals
Giants head coach Brian Daboll calls to his players during the first half of a preseason NFL football game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Sunday, Aug. 21, 2022, in East Rutherford, N.J. Credit: AP/John Minchillo
If your team scored to go ahead by three points with 13 seconds left in an AFC playoff game and still failed to win you’d probably have some pretty sleepless nights tossing and turning and trying to figure out what could have been done differently.
You might even cook up with something that looked like what the Giants did on Sunday night.
Their 25-22 preseason win over the Bengals saw a rather unusual defensive alignment on the next-to-last snap of the game that helped preserve the victory and kept the Bengals and their strong-legged kicker Evan McPherson from attempting a long game-tying field goal (luckily there are no more overtimes in the preseason). It was a kind of sideline prevent scheme with the outside linebackers stationed almost out of bounds at the snap of the ball to keep the Bengals from hitting a short pass, ducking across the white line, and setting up for the kick.
Here’s how it unfolded. The Bengals were out of timeouts but had reached the Giants’ 43 with nine seconds left to play. The clock had stopped and they could have attempted a field goal of about 61 yards but instead decided to run an offensive play. That was flagged for a false start which pushed them back to the 48 with the same nine seconds left.
Knowing that the only chance the Bengals had to tie the game would be that quick pass on the boundary to set up a kick attempt, the Giants protected that area of the field as much as they could. Jake Browning completed a pass to Trenton Irvin and linebacker Tamon Fox drilled him on a dead sprint from that sideline position to force a fumble recovered by Olaijah Griffin.
“We try to practice as many different situations as we can,” head coach Brian Daboll said. “We practice a lot offensively what we would do in that situation and defensively there are different ways to defend it. Wink (Martindale) has done a really good job of implementing his stuff along with the assistant coaches that we have.”
While Daboll demurred on being the provenance of that scheme, he never said it wasn’t his idea or that it wasn’t a response to last year’s AFC playoff game when his Bills allowed Kansas City to drive for the tying field that sent the game to overtime (the Bills never saw the ball and wound up losing). That drive to tie the score in January was a little different than Sunday’s; Kansas City had all three of its timeouts when it received the kickoff with 13 seconds left and used two of them to set up their 49-yard field goal. But the passes of 19 and 25 yards to Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce that brought Kansas City to the Buffalo 31 for that attempt certainly left Daboll and the rest of the Bills scarred… and may have stirred their creativity.
“It was a good play, a good hit,” Daboll said of Fox’s thunderbolt on Irvin Sunday night. “It was good situation football, a good call by Wink, and well-executed by the players.”
Wherever it came from, the end result certainly allowed Daboll to sleep better than he did the last time his team was clinging to a late lead.
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.
More Giants
