What Do the New York Giants Need to Do to Become a Playoff Contender?
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The Giants are coming off one of their worst seasons in franchise history, finishing 3-14 and landing the 3rd pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. In this analysis I’ll compare their roster to the NFL’s top 3 regular season teams (Chiefs, Lions, and Eagles) to see which positions they should emphasize in their rebuild in order to make the team a playoff contender.
I’ll be using the Approximate Value (AV) stat to make my comparisons across the teams and positions on the teams. Let’s take a look at the results in the table below.
Table 1: Giants positional comparison to the Chiefs, Lions, and Eagles. The Avg Diff is the Giants AV minus the average value of the other three teams.
The Giants four biggest lacks are the offensive line (-23.7 AV), defensive line (-15.7 AV), running back (-12.3) AV, and quarterback (-9.7 AV).
How much of this AV deficit do they need to address for them to become a contender?
Figure 1: Linear Regression of Team Wins vs Team Total AV (excluding special teams)
Based on the regression analysis in Figure 1, the Giants will need to add approximately 53 AV to gain an expected 6 wins and catapult themselves into playoff contention.
The quarterback position is an obvious point of improvement, and it seems likely that they will aim to address this need in the draft. If the Giants hit on the draft and close the gap halfway between their abysmal 2024 QB performance and that of the NFL’s elite teams, they can hope to gain 5 AV. The Giants will need to add 2 solid offensive lineman to gain an AV of 20 and protect their future rookie QB. Adding a top-notch pass-rusher could increase their AV by 10 and adding a 3rd running back to complement their current duo of Singletary and Tracy Jr. could add another 5 AV.
That totals to 40 added AV, good for them to make the jump to 7.5 expected wins in 2025.
Evidently, in order for the NY Giants to become a playoff caliber team, they will need to not only cover their biggest weaknesses but also turn one or more of them into a strength.
