Giants 2023 draftees will learn what a difference a year makes
New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll after a game against the Indianapolis Colts on Jan. 1, 2023. Credit: AP/Seth Wenig
The rookies who join the Giants this draft weekend will have no idea how lucky they have it.
They’ll never know.
It is as if the five consecutive losing seasons from 2017 to 2021 have been erased. Yes, they are part of Giants history. But, when you think about it, they are barely mentioned anymore.
So be it.
The foundation, following a 9-7-1 season that included the Giants' first playoff win since 2011, has been laid under general manager Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll.
The coaching staff is not only competent — we’ve learned the difference over the years — but it is also player friendly. Offensive coordinator Mike Kafka and defensive coordinator Wink Martindale both interviewed elsewhere for head-coaching opportunities after last season.
Neither left.
There is an in-this-together feel to the locker room where — at times, when the media isn’t present — even Daboll participates in the Ping-pong battles.
It is that locker room that these rookies, those drafted over three days and supplemented by a group of rookie free agents, will join.
Daniel Jones, now the franchise quarterback, recently acknowledged the difference.
“Last year at this time, you are trying to learn everything for the first time,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of information, a lot of early memorization, the basic information of the system and kind of learning the alphabet, learning the first step.
“This year, obviously, we got a little bit of a jump start there, knowing the system, but you’re always learning and you’re always adapting, seeing what’s new, helping the newer guys learn, so in some sense you start over again and you don’t want to overlook anything or skip any of those critical steps.”
Jones added: “I think last year at this time, you’re trying to learn the very basic part of the offense, the simple language, and memorizing a lot of those terms having learned them now, you’re a little bit further ahead. [We are] definitely in a better spot.”
In 2022, Jones recorded a career-high passer rating of 92.5 and an NFL-low 1.1% interception rate. (If you think about it, the rookies who are selected by the Giants may never know of their quarterback’s issues with ball security.)
With a new four-year contract, Jones has job security in an offense he knows inside and out.
For Schoen, one of the challenges — and something to remember as this draft unfolds — has been to make certain that defensive draft choices fit Martindale’s scheme.
“Yeah, we’ve had to retrain a little bit how we look at different positions or the value we put on them based off Wink’s system,” Schoen said, “and I think that’s what's most important: What is the value for the Giants and how do we see them?”
Schoen acknowledged that those conversation would continue, including during the draft.
Yes, these Giants, as the 2023 season inches closer, are ahead of where they’ve been. It seems reasonable to assume the incoming rookies will be beneficiaries of that.
Left tackle Andrew Thomas acknowledged as much, with a catch.
“It definitely helps, seeing familiar faces and then the scheme, the language and stuff like that, you're not learning a whole new system,” Thomas said. “But it’s still a new team, a new group of guys that are going to be out there and that’s just how it is in the NFL, it changes every year. We’ve got to build that team camaraderie and stuff like that as if we’re a new team, because we are.”
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
