Which factors hit the NY Giants the hardest in the rankings?
Coming in at 29th on ESPN’s future rankings, the NY Giants received an overall score of 69.3 or a D+ by their measurement.
The NFL Insiders came to this score by averaging out their opinionated scores of the total roster sans the quarterback, the quarterback situation, the coaching staff, the front office, and 2020 draft results, separately and then averaging all the scores out.
The most troubling part of these rankings – besides being ranked so lowly overall, to begin with – is that Big Blue failed to crack the top 20 in any of these categories, which I think is the main concern of the NY Giants fan base overall.
While the team does have some promising young talent, it lacks elite playmakers outside of Saquon Barkley and he plays a very replaceable position. In fact, ESPN rated the NY Giants total roster (without quarterbacks) as last in the league at #32, showing just how far away this team could possibly be.
Interestingly enough, even though their roster was ranked last in total talent with a score of 65.3, ESPN rated the NY Giants’ front office even lower with a total score at 62.0. “Luckily” for GM Dave Gettleman, the WorldWide Leader believes there are three GM’s that deserve a score even worse than that — shout out Bill O’Brien.
I’ve been as hard as anyone on Dave Gettleman during his time here, and while I do feel he deserves that low ranking, I do feel he’s made some promising moves this offseason and the team is trending on the uptick because of them.
Joe Judge and the coaching staff were ranked 25th in the league, which may sound bad but is really a sign of respect as the entire staff is brand new and Judge is a rookie head coach that’s never even been an offensive or defensive coordinator.
In the score I disagree with most, the writers of this piece scored Big Blue’s 2020 draft at just a 74 – 20th in the league – despite the team coming away with multiple blue-chippers and finding some diamonds in the rough late.
At least Daniel Jones was shown an ounce of respect as well, as Big Blue’s quarterback situation was ranked 21st in the league.
Opinions around the league are all over the place (hint: the people that actually watched him play mostly like him), so to see him ranked near the middle of the pack after just one year in the league is encouraging — especially when you consider the hellfire that was rained down on Gettleman after he selected Jones for his perceived lack of skill and deservingness to be a first-round pick.
Obviously, ESPN and this particular team of insiders/writers don’t have all the answers, but this ‘news’ can’t be taken as a positive.
At the end of the day, the NY Giants are rebuilding, and it’s impossible to project how that rebuild is going to finish out without watching it play out, so we really won’t know if this article was right or wrong for quite some time.
I’m going to go ahead and opine that it’s mostly wrong on Big Blue, as I don’t expect the team to be picking in the top five moving forward into the future for quite some time as the piece suggests