Giants' injury-prone defense blitzing less under Steve Spagnuolo
Steve Spagnuolo has a reputation as a defensive coordinator who not only likes to blitz but develop crazy, unexpected ones. He comes from the old Jim Johnson coaching tree in Philadelphia and has spent his career sending linebackers and safeties and corners at quarterbacks.
"Not so much this year, though," he said with a wink.
The Giants have been more reserved than many people thought they would be when Spagnuolo took over. It's shown up in some of the stats -- the Giants are last in the NFL in sacks with just nine through nine games -- but it seems something that the defensive coordinator is comfortable with.
So why the new Spags?
"There's a lot of reasons, I don't want to go into all of them," he said on Thursday. "But one of the things that does get tough is when the parts are changing. There's certain positions that change a lot."
He's talking, of course, about injuries that have hampered the Giants defense. Consider that when he was asked about losing "John" for the season the other day, he had to request clarification before answering: Jon Beason or Johnathan Hankins? Both key starters were placed on injured reserve in the last week. He's also played with different starting corners, different linebacker combos, and different defensive line configurations throughout the season. The Giants have not had the same starting 11 defensive players in consecutive games this season, and with Hankins out they won't this week either.
As for the players who are on the field, Spagnuolo said he tries to tailor his play-calling to their skills.
"Look it, I think we function best with this group of guys -- and that's what you're always assessing, the guys you have -- the group of guys that we have, who I love, play better when you just let them play," he said. "Less thinking, just play. I just think we function better that way. So some of the things you're talking about [with blitzing] take a little bit more [thinking]. So we've been trying to stick to things that we do and know and try to play fast, that's kind of been the motto."
In fact, they have an actual motto for it.
"Last week our motto was, 'simplify to magnify.' Simplify what we were doing to magnify how fast we were playing. So I thought we played pretty well except for those two [big] plays last week. So we'll try to do the same thing and throw a wrinkle in there when we can."
Has it been hard for him and blitzing tendencies to pull away from that aggressive play-calling?
"A little bit," he admitted. "But look it, it's all about trying to get the best guys on the field functioning the best."
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.
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