New Giants assistant Bobby Johnson putting it on the line
NY Giants giants assistant coach Bobby Johnson Credit: Evan Pinkus / NY Giants
He won’t play a snap. He won’t call a play, either. He’s not going to have anyone screaming his name in anger or praise on sports talk radio, and the TV cameras that cover the games will pan right past him.
But Bobby Johnson has one of the most important jobs on the Giants this season.
He’s the new offensive line coach, tasked with bringing stability and functionality to a position room where neither has resided for some time, filling a role that many in recent years have held and failed at.
Oh, and if he can’t do it, hardly any of the other steps the Giants are hoping to accomplish in this season under their new head coach and general manager will be able to occur.
Pressure?
“To be honest,” he said, “no.”
The word he chose to describe his lot was, instead, responsibility.
“The unit hasn’t performed to expectations,” he said. “My responsibility is to get them to do that. There is not pressure in that, it’s just what comes with the job.”
It’s a job that has become one of the hottest seats in the NFL with more turnover than just about any other in the league. In just the past two seasons, the Giants have had three different men hold the title and, thanks to a COVID-19 absence in 2020, four different men serve as offensive line coach during games.
That doesn’t even include the mishmash of staff holding titles such as advisers and senior assistants whom the Giants tried to use last year in an attempt to overwhelm the problem with sheer force of numbers. There were times during the 2021 season when there were more coaches working directly with the offensive line than there were available players.
Needless to say, it did not help.
As for those players, they were cycled through with similar rapidity, the front office hunting and pecking for bodies that could open up cracks for the running backs and give the quarterbacks more than fractions of a second in the pocket.
It’s why Johnson knew what he had to do when he took the job this offseason after having spent the previous three seasons with the Bills. He had to get rid of all the bad vibes and sour sentiments that have accumulated around the position group as it funneled toward despair.
He needed to perform a football exorcism.
“In this profession, whether you are a coach or a player, you have things we call scar tissue or, not to make light of the situation, some PTSD over things that have happened to you and shape your identity and shape your philosophy,” he said. “There are some guys I have interacted with who have that because of things that have happened in the recent past ... I’m sure there were things that happened that were bad. If you keep worrying about them, they’re going to repeat themselves.”
To make that point, Johnson made a deal with his players, some of whom were here for the ugly times that preceded his arrival and some who, like Johnson, have come from elsewhere to try to fix it. He promised them he would not spend his time talking about the Bills and the players he had coached in Buffalo and the successes they had there. Their end of the deal was that they would not talk about their former coaches and travails here with the Giants.
“That’s over with,” he told them. “That’s in the past. You learn from it but you don’t bring it up. You don’t live in it.
"I think that’s the best way to get them to move on.”
There is no certainty that it will work, that the offensive line will be better (although it certainly is difficult to imagine it being worse than it has been the last few years). Johnson has the advantage of what seems to be better personnel than that with which his failed predecessors were saddled.
Andrew Thomas is entering his third season at left tackle, and although he is still recovering from offseason ankle surgery, he is seen as the cornerstone of the rebuild.
“I think he’s got a boatload of room to develop,” Johnson said. “That’s not saying he’s performed at a low level thus far, it’s just that I think the world of the kid.”
The Giants drafted Evan Neal with the seventh overall pick in April, and he’ll begin his career for them at right tackle.
On the interior, the Giants are looking forward to the return of Shane Lemieux at guard, the addition of Mark Glowinski at the other guard, and, perhaps most importantly, Jon Feliciano at center.
Because he has worked with Johnson since he was drafted by the Raiders in 2015 and in Buffalo the last three years, Feliciano is the new prototype for a Giants offensive lineman.
“For us coming in and implementing a new system, his value from that facet alone is immeasurable,” Johnson said. “The fact that he can come in and help the quarterback, the other centers, the O-line, even if he winds up not being the starting center, his value for our preparation week in and week out would be just off the charts.”
More than that, though, Feliciano brings the attitude Johnson wants to spread through the group. Feliciano even has a cherished nickname Johnson writes on the board each day when he posts the depth chart:
“Dirtbag.”
“That’s how he plays,” Johnson said of the moniker, calling Feliciano a “grimy” guy who “feels like he has something to prove every day not only as a player but as a man.”
“He plays the game on the edge, and you have to have that. Sometimes if you don’t have that from each guy, you have to develop that kind of attitude in the room and Jon plays that way. Mark Glowinski plays that way. I think we have other guys who will play that way. And they’ll find from me as their coach if they don’t play that way, they will not play.”
It’s still a very big chore for Johnson, who, unlike many on the staff and front office who made the migration from Buffalo to the Giants this offseason, did so as a lateral move and not as a promotion. During his first interactions with the Giants media this past week, he was even asked why, with the Bills appearing to be so close to a championship, he followed Daboll to a team that is starting over in almost every facet of the organization.
“Have they won a title?” he said of the Bills. “Did they win a title? There were 31 teams that were disappointed at the end of last season. You could argue, hey, they were close, but the team that lost in the Super Bowl has the same thing as a team that didn’t make the playoffs: Nothing. They don’t have a trophy.”
Johnson said he has no regrets about his move, nor does he ever intend to have any.
“Yeah, hindsight is 20/20, but if they win the Super Bowl, am I going to go ‘Damn?’ No,” he said. “I’m going to call a bunch of them and say ‘Congratulations, man, I’m happy for you.’ But what I’m really looking forward to is having success here. That’s what my job is, having success here, and that’s all I’m worried about.”
Given the state of the Giants’ offensive line situation and the coaches who have tried to tackle it for much of the past decade, that’s probably enough to worry about, too.
“I’ve had the benefit of having some really good jobs,” Johnson said. “This is another really good job.”
Maybe it could be. If he can make it one.
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.
