If you’d told me before the season that the New York Giants’ defense would rank in the top 10 in blitz rate by mid-October, I’d have assumed something had gone horribly wrong. And, well, I guess something kind of did.
Brian Burns tore his ACL, and the pass rush had all but disappeared, but Dennard Wilson decided he was done waiting around for it to come back.
Big Blue's defensive coordinator has built his reputation on a press-zone, bend-don't-break scheme, with his defenses in Tennessee blitzing somewhere around 21-22% of the time. That’s all well and good when you’ve got the guys up front who can provide pressure on their own. When you're more like the G-Men, and your front produced one sack in three games, something has to give.
So Wilson gave.
New York blitzed on 53.8% of dropbacks in its Week 4 win over the Arizona Cardinals, then cranked it up to 62% in Sunday’s overtime tie with the Washington Commanders, the team’s highest rate since Wink Martindale was calling the defense in 2023. The result? Seven sacks in two games and a 1-0-1 record.
Giants’ Dennard Wilson is blitzing his way out of a bad situation
Plenty of coordinators would’ve kept running their system, regardless of the personnel -- look at Shane Bowen last year. He spent a year trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and it cost him his job. Wilson is evolving in real time. Charles Darwin would be proud.
He knows what he doesn’t have. No Burns, Kayvon Thibodeaux is giving them a whole lotta nothing, and Abdul Carter can’t win every rep by himself, no matter how good he looks. Instead of waiting for the guys to figure it out on their own (or not), Wilson started manufacturing pressure, sending a defensive back on 41% of Jayden Daniels’ dropbacks Sunday. Slot corner Dru Phillips was the biggest beneficiary, finishing with two sacks and four pressures.
Wilson got even greedier as the game went on. Per Next Gen Stats, 14 of the Giants’ 24 blitzes came in the fourth quarter and overtime, when the blitz rate jumped to 74%.
On 10 of Daniels’ dropbacks, Wilson dialed up Cover 0 -- no safety help, corners on an island, fingers crossed -- and Big Blue brought him down three times. Washington didn’t score on any of its final three drives, and Daniels went 2-of-8 for 23 yards under pressure.
Is it risky traveling to Blitz City that much? Absolutely. Sending the house against a mobile QB like Daniels means living with the occasional disaster, and while they didn't come against blitzes, disaster struck twice, with two touchdown runs of 38 and 26 yards. The G-men gave up 202 rushing yards total, which isn’t exactly the sign of a defense with everything figured out.
But the run defense can wait for another article some other time. As of the writing of this article, the Giants have the ninth-highest blitz rate in the league at 39.2%, and if the last two weeks are any indication, that number is only going to go up.
It’s probably not the defense Wilson had in mind when he took the job, but it’s working, and with the Giants sitting atop the NFC East at 3-1-1, that’s all that matters.
Add us as a preferred source on Google