And now for something completely different

It’s been a long time since the New York Giants Offensive line was one of the best in the NFL. All but the youngest fans remember the early Eli Manning years when the line was the engine behind a devastating running game and usually gave Eli enough time to get the ball to his receivers downfield. The past decade, though, has been nothing short of a disaster, with three different Giants’ general managers not yet having cracked the code of what it takes to provide decent protection for Giants quarterbacks.

Is that about to change? Each season Ben Baldwin, creator of the great RBSDM website that provides a variety of stats for NFL team performance, predicts the performance of each team’s offensive line for the upcoming season. His predictions are about as objective as is possible for offensive linemen: They are based on projected starters at each position from Ourlads combined with Pro Football Focus pass-blocking grades for those players from the previous season. The Ourlads projections themselves are a bit subjective since they are based on someone’s assumption of who the starters will be. Here, for example, is their current Giants depth chart:

Andrew Thomas at left Tackle and John Michael Schmitz at center are likely starters, though for different reasons: High quality in Thomas’ case, and a leash of at least one more season for Schmitz, who had a somewhat disappointing rookie season. Jon Runyan is a projected starter at guard, which makes sense for a player who signed a $10M per year free agent contract, but Ourlads has him at right guard rather than left. That’s because the Giants’ other free-agent offensive line, Jermaine Eluemenor, is penciled in at right tackle rather than right guard, and Evan Neal is relegated to the bench. The Giants surely plan to give Neal one more shot at right tackle, but not a long one. If Eluemenor prevails for the right tackle job, Neal may be pushed inside to right guard. Runyan in that case would be at left guard. Ourlads, though, has free agent Aaron Stinnie at left guard. They don’t state their reasoning, but it seems to be: Who are the best three offensive linemen at these positions based on past performance?

PFF grades are subjective, since they are based on analysts watching tape rather than objective stats. It’s probably not too difficult most of the time, though, to decide whether an offensive lineman has won his block or lost it on a given play, which is what the grade is based on. In 2023 the Giants ranked last in pass blocking as a team in PFF’s eyes, with the lowest team grade in PFF’s two-decade history. I don’t know of many people who would take issue with that assessment.

In any case, Baldwin takes that information and handles it completely objectively on his end. At each offensive line position, he ranks the projected starters based on their previous season’s PFF pass-blocking grade and reports the percentile for each player. The results for all five positions are combined, with (if memory serves me) tackles being weighted higher than guards, who are weighted higher than centers, to produce overall team OL rankings.

Here are the projections for 2024:

Yes, your New York Football Giants are projected to be in the upper half of the NFL (not by much, but still...) in pass blocking for the upcoming season. There are a few things to be said in the “pump your brakes” category about the projection:

• As the mutual fund folks like to tell us, past performance is not an indicator of future returns, so take the PFF grades that determine the percentiles with a grain of salt.
• This chart is pre-draft. Baldwin usually re-does it once teams have drafted and there are new projected starters for at least some teams, so this may look different by August.
• If Ourlads had projected Neal as the starter at right tackle, the Giants’ ranking would have been lower. What is true, though, is that some Giants fans may be underestimating Eluemunor, who had a pretty good 2023.
• Pre-season rankings of anything cannot anticipate injuries. The single biggest reason for the Giants’ OL problem last year was that Andrew Thomas (94th percentile in pass blocking) missed half the season with a hamstring injury.
• The effect of replacing Bobby Johnson with Carmen Bricillo does not enter the calculation. It is feasible that Neal and JMS may improve under his tutelage. Remember 2020 vs. 2021 Andrew Thomas.

Still, just seeing the Giants in the left column is exciting. That being said, any pre-season prediction plus $2.90 will get you a ride on the subway. Did Baldwin’s framework anticipate that the Giants’ offensive line might have problems in 2023? Here are his projections from July of last year (for rookies like JMS, he uses historical data for rookie PFF grades as a function of draft position to estimate where they might rank at their position):

Don’t say he didn’t warn us. He had the Giants last in the NFL in 2023 pass blocking in July, well before any games had been played, with only Thomas (95th percentile) and Mark Glowinski (56th percentile) being at least adequate. Thomas went down in Game 1, Glowinski was banished to the bench after a terrible Game 1, and the rest is unpleasant history.

A couple of other points can be made by looking at other teams:

• Fans would like the Giants to field five Pro Bowlers on the line. Aside from the fact that you could never pay five players of that caliber once their rookie contracts were up, it’s just not feasible to expect to find five players who are very good at pass blocking. It’s one of the hardest things to do in the NFL. In Baldwin’s 2024 projection, you have Nos. 1 and 2 Detroit and Green Bay with the closest thing to an ideal line, and a few other teams with every starter at least above average, and that’s it. Most teams have at least one weak position, and many have two or more.
• This isn’t the NFC East you’re used to. Dallas, which has historically had an auspicious offensive line, has fallen on hard times (No. 28). Right guard and left tackle are very solid with Zack Martin and Tyler Smith, but center and right tackle are big issues with projected starters Brock Hoffman and Terence Steele. The left side of the Philadelphia offensive line is in good hands with Jordan Mailata and Landon Dickerson, plus the excellent Lane Johnson at right tackle, and they still rank No. 2. The right interior, though, is the soft underbelly, with Jason Kelce no longer there to neutralize Dexter Lawrence and untested Cam Jurgens in his place, with also untested Tyler Steen next to him. The tush push may get pushed out of the game plan in 2024. Washington (No. 26) is impressive inside, but very vulnerable on the edges with Braeden Daniels at left tackle and Andrew Wylie at right tackle.

Dexy, Kayvon, Brian - gentlemen, start your engines.