Giants hope Lorenzo Carter, Oshane Ximines can get after the quarterback this season

Bret Bielema likes to think there is just something in a person that makes him an effective outside linebacker. He calls it “OLB DNA,” and it’s a six-letter acronym he has been stressing to his players for months.

“DNA is something that is in you, that describes who you are, and you are given it at birth,” said Bielema, who coaches the outside linebackers for the Giants. “As an outside linebacker group, we try to do things to establish who we are to the outside world… If I have a group of guys that maintain those things, we have a chance to be successful.”

By that thinking, it would seem successful edge rushers are born and not made.

But there is another way of looking at it, one that the Giants will be experimenting with and exploring for most of this season. In the debate that swirls around just about every aspect of life – nature vs. nurture – the Giants are hoping it turns out to be a little bit of both.

They have two young players in Lorenzo Carter and Oshane Ximines who have had somewhat underwhelming starts to their careers, and this season will go a long way in determining whether a new coaching staff and a new scheme can help them reach the potential the Giants saw when they drafted them… or if they simply are who they are.

Carter, in his third NFL season, has 8.5 career sacks split almost evenly between his two seasons. Ximines, coming into his second season, had 4.5 as a rookie. Neither of them has quite claimed his place in the long and until recently unbroken link of homegrown pass rushers that the Giants have enjoyed, a chain that stretches back to Lawrence Taylor and continued through Michael Strahan, Osi Umenyiora and Jason Pierre-Paul.

That’s where Bielema comes in, melding his theories on genetics and swim moves. He seems to understand, for starters, that there is no one-size-fits-all playbook for the position.

“The run game is kind of a universal thing,” he said. “How do we play, what do we do, how do we do certain things. But the pass game, in particular pass rush, is very unique to each player.  You can’t teach a player who maybe doesn’t feel comfortable with a club rip or a grab and go or a stab and jab or whatever it is. Some guys just feel better in different roles. As a pass rusher, if you don’t have confidence before the ball is snapped, you’re not going to play well at all.”

Both players said they spent time this offseason working toward becoming game-changing players.

“It was really just refining my game, working hands, working power, and working the angles really,” Carter said of the work he focused on. “A lot of times, it comes down to what types of angles you have. That’s one thing I saw a lot last year and then the coaches pointed it out to me when we got into the lab this year.”

Ximines, who made the jump from Old Dominion to the NFL last year, said he saw himself develop as his rookie year went on.

“After playing a full season I know what to expect,” he said. “It’s good going into Year Two. You feel a lot more comfortable.”

The Giants will feel more comfortable about these two players when they can get to the quarterback more consistently, when they possibly grow into the next branches on the Giants pass-rushing family tree.

Can that happen? Can a young dynamic player suddenly emerge from one who has been mostly middling?

“It’s easy to see that both of them have a lot of talent, a lot of raw physical skills that they’ve been able to hone,” Bielema said. “Hopefully the results will start to show up on Sundays the way that they envision them and the way we envision them… and hopefully everyone on the outside world (envisions them) as well.”

And then we’ll know about the nature vs. nurture. At least when it comes to these two players, anyway.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.