Grades and advanced stats for the Giants’ victory over the Texans

By almost any measure, Sunday’s overtime victory over the Houston Texans was the Giants’ most impressive performance of the team during the John Harbaugh era so far. Let’s look at Pro Football Focus grades and advanced stats to get a better feel for what underlies that statement.

First, I don’t usually show this, but PFF gives overall team grades in different categories for each game, so let me back up my statement above with an independent opinion:

You can see that overall, only the victory over the Cardinals beats yesterday’s win over the Texans overall…and Houston is a better team than Arizona. In PFF’s eyes it was by far the Giants’ best game of the season on offense, passing, and rushing. It was their second worst pass blocking game, but that’s because Houston has the best set of edge defenders in the NFL and both Giants tackles are battling injuries but still playing. On defense PFF sees the Giants as having had a number of better games, but the degree of difficulty playing against Houston was certainly higher than most of their previous opponents. What the Giants did give was their best overall pass rushing effort of the season.

PFF grades: Offense

Seven elite or very good grades on offense, 13 of 18 at least average, and none in the very poor or worse range is something we’re not used to seeing from PFF for the Giants.

It’s of course a very small sample, but after 1+ games as a real NFL quarterback this season (i.e., ignoring the RPO cameos), J.J. McCarthy is PFF’s 10th ranked quarterback. (The highest ranked quarterback, as you no doubt will have guessed, is…Drew Lock, in an almost equally small sample.) McCarthy is just behind Drake Maye and…C.J. Stroud, whom the Giants beat on Sunday.

Sunday, McCarthy was amazing in the first half and came back to Earth a bit in the second half, but for a guy just learning the offense, it’s quite a debut as starter. The thing about McCarthy is that among QBs with 50 or more dropbacks he’s leading the NFL with a 12.3 aDOT. I say it ad nauseum, but in today’s NFL, explosive plays win games, and McCarthy gave the Giants that dimension yesterday. It’s not just a fluke. Last year, among QBs with at least 275 dropbacks, McCarthy was tied for fourth in the NFL with a 9.5 aDOT, trailing only Matthew Stafford, Lamar Jackson, and Drake Maye. McCarthy had three “big-time throws” and no turnover-worthy plays, and five BTTs and only one TWP in his two “real” games. That’s quite an improvement from last year, when he had 19 BTTs and 15 TWPs as a Viking. Right now it’s a small sample; if J.J. keeps it up, we may conclude that Matt Nagy’s offense is just a better fit for him than KOC’s was…or that Nagy was better at adapting his offense to J.J.‘s skill set.

Here is McCarthy’s spray chart from Sunday:

That’s five throws more than 20 yards beyond the line of scrimmage. That loosens defenses up, even though only two were completed. Respect the deep ball, and the intermediate routes open up: He completed 5 of 7 passes in the 10-20 yard range.

The other thing to say is that I thought it would be a better idea for the Giants to start Jameis Winston in Houston and then switch to McCarthy in the second half if Jameis played poorly or after the bye, which I thought would play better in the locker room. A few of you disagreed (lol). I’m not in the locker room and so I can’t say how the team reacted to the announcement that Jameis was being demoted to DTP (Designated Tush-Pusher). But regardless of that, winning cures everything, I suspect.

At the other end of the passing game, Malik Nabers just keeps on truckin’, with an almost elite grade Sunday and his fourth consecutive 100+ yard receiving game. Here’s an amusing stat:

Nabers’ 605 receiving yards for the season is fifth in the NFL, and he is within 30 yards of all the receivers ahead of him except the unreal Jaxon Smith-Njigba. The bigger story may be Malachi Fields, who had a career-high four receptions in 5five targets Sunday, and more importantly 40 YAC. With Nabers, Fields, and Isaiah Likely, who had a quiet two catches in three targets and may have played injured part of the time, the Giants may have a pretty effective receiver corps. H/T to Thomas Fidone, who had his first NFL catch for 29 yards and almost a TD.

The running game was a big reason for this victory. The Giants don’t have an elite back, but Cam Skattebo was let out of the doghouse and ran for 124 yards, his season high and by far his best game of the season, and a TD, including the run that set up Devin Singletary’s game-winning OT run on the next play. Singletary likewise had by far his best game, capped by his winning TD run in which he eluded at least two tacklers.

As you can see from the first chart in this post, it’s no coincidence that the Giants’ effective running coincided with the offensive line’s best run blocking effort since the opening game win over Dallas. First off, Patrick Ricard, whose run blocking had been at best average up to this point, had by far his best run blocking game of the season. The rest of the line was adequate at best in run blocking in PFF’s opinion, but that’s better than in recent weeks when PFF saw them as clearly below average.

The pass blocking was a different story. PFF saw this as one of the Giants’ worst collective pass blocking efforts of the season. That’s no surprise given the Texans’ trio of Will Anderson Jr., Danielle Hunter, and Jadaveon Clowney on the edge. Unsurprisingly then, the Giants’ tackles, Andrew Thomas and Jermaine Eluemunor, both playing at less that 100% health, had mediocre pass blocking grades. Thomas surrendered only his second sack of the season. That said, holding those two to one sack is a pretty good day at the office. It’s all relative (which PFF grades are not). The interior offensive line, though, did better, especially rookie Sisi Mauigoa, who got by far his best pass blocking grade of the season from PFF. Again, though, the strength of Houston’s defensive line is on the edge.

PFF grades: Defense

Overall PFF didn’t see this as the Giants’ best defensive effort of the season, but considering the quality of the opponent, perhaps it was. What they did have was three tremendous efforts by individual players.

D.J. Reader is having an outstanding first season as a Giant, and by PFF’s reckoning, the best season of his career so far. He had three pressures of C.J. Stroud, a tackle and an assist, and no missed tackles. Someone to keep an eye on is draftee Bobby Jameson-Travis, the sixth-round pick out of Auburn, who saw action for the second week in a row and got a very good overall grade, primarily due to his run defense. Abdul Carter continues to excel, with four more pressures; that makes it 20 in the last four weeks. Kayvon Thibodeaux is starting to come alive: His three pressures were his third consecutive game with that many, and he almost intercepted a pass. Thibodeaux gets grief from fans because he never became the sack machine that Aidan Hutchinson, drafted three spots ahead of him, did, but Thibodeaux does a lot of the dirty work that allows Carter to find a path to the QB. Look at him being triple-teamed on this play as Carter forces a rushed throw:

Arvell Reese had another excellent game, getting two pressures and a sack. Elsewhere on the line, Shelby Harris had a rough game while Darius Alexander had an average overall score but got his first sack of the season.

Elsewhere on the defense, it’s a bunch of mixed overall grades, but that hides some good performances in specific aspects of play. Deonte Banks is a good example (more on him below): OK overall defense grade, but very good coverage grade – he really shut down Nico Collins. Same thing for Paulson Adebo – he was invisible yesterday, right? But he had a very good run defense grade (three tackles, all of them “stops), and the one pass completion he gave up in two targets was for a loss of a yard. The other defensive backs had subpar scores, but (or because) they barely showed up on the stat sheet; perhaps their assigned receivers were getting open but they were not being targeted by Stroud.

Micah McFadden’s overall grade (36.4) is terrible; that’s because Stroud picked on him in pass coverage (10 completions in 14 targets for 111 yards and a TD, including 71 YAC). McFadden did have nine tackles, though he missed three, and that hurt his grade as well. This is what was lost when Tremaine Edmunds went down, but we’ll see if McFadden improves with more play after hardly playing at all this season.

Advanced stats

I don’t know how he calculates it, but X user Stick to the Model produces a team “Fraud Meter” before every week’s games, sharing his take on which teams are better/worse than their current record. Here is last Wednesday’s Fraud Meter:

The Texans, projected by him to finish 9-8, were seen as much better than their actual 2-4 record before their game with the Giants, while the Giants were the biggest potential “frauds”, sitting 3-2-1 while projecting to be 7-9-1. We’ll see how much the Giants move up this week. In defense of the model, they still haven’t beaten a team with a winning record and they’ve only played one team with a winning record (and lost badly).

If you are starting to think about playoff scenarios for the Giants, rbsdm.com has created an interactive tool in which you can pick the winner of each future Giants game and see how it affects their playoff chances:

I tried it, and here’s how it turned out. First, the simulator gives the Giants a 44% chance of making the playoffs at the moment:

If I choose the Giants to win their next two games (vs. PHI and WAS), the odds jump to 75%. If that happens and I pencil in losses to JAX, SF, and SEA, plus a win at IND, the odds go down, but only to 68%.

More about J.J. McCarthy:

This puts J.J.’s aDOT into a larger context. Obviously there’s a correlation between aDOT and time to throw, that’s just a law of nature. But McCarthy was decisive about those throws vs. Houston. Only Jordan Love was obviously better in looking downfield and getting the ball out quickly.

A different look at throw depth, this one for the season to date, not just Week 7:

You can see who the great deep throwers in the NFL are right now: Mahomes, Allen, Geno Smith, Maye. etc. McCarthy (third row, far right) isn’t that so far, but his sweet spot the past two weeks has been that intermediate (15-30 yds) part of the field. That’s good enough to have a dangerous passing offense, but you’d like to see him start hitting on the really deep throws to loosen up defenses.

As for overall CPOE, McCarthy was second only to Drake Maye this week:

One more chart, comparing all three Giants QBs this season: Big play vs. drive-killing play rate, based on positive vs. negative EPA swings of at least 1.5:

Let’s talk a little about Deonte Banks:

Whether it’s Banks finally getting to play in a defense that suits him, or Dennard Wilson and his staff teaching him better technique, or Banks taking the Giants declining his fifth year option to heart, he’s a different player this year.

And by the way, now seven weeks into the season, Banks’ 21.85 mph on his 98-yard INT return to seal the win over Arizona in Week 4 still stands as the second -fastest run by any player at any position this year:

Some love for the running backs and offensive line:

Cam Skattebo in particular led the NFL in rushing yards over expected:

Finally, not a stat, just Arvell Reese showing unbelievable hustle, going all the way downfield after rushing the passer to make a tackle: