The Giants Case of the Disappearing RPOs
Raise your hand if you thought the Giants rushing game would rank dead last in the NFL after two weeks of the season.
You’re not alone, yet here they are, having recorded a paltry 104 yards on the ground, an average of 2.7 yards per carry, through two games.
With Saquon Barkley now on injured reserve with zero chance of returning this season, let's just say the oddsmakers don't exactly favor the Giants to finish the 2020 season in the top five in rushing.
That begs the question: if the Giants couldn’t get the running game going when they had a healthy Saquon Barkley in the lineup, what on earth are they going to do to jumpstart the running game without him?
One potential answer, believe it or not, could be to feed he ball a little more to their rushing yardage team leader: quarterback Daniel Jones.
If you had Jones, who has 43 yards on seven carries (6.1 yards per carry) leading the team in rushing yardage after two weeks, then please send over the winning Pick-6 Lottery numbers for the State of New Jersey ASAP.
But seriously, one of the benefits that Jones brings to the Giants offense that hasn’t been used nearly as much has been his mobility.
On the surface, that's somewhat of a surprise considering Dak Prescott, who played in Giants offensive coordinator Jason Garrett's system in Dallas, has, at times, made a living on the RPOs.
The Giants? In two games called by Garrett so far, Jones has run just one RPO in two games according to Pro Football Focus, a play in which he gained four yards.
By contrast, last year, when Jones took over on offense for Eli Manning, the Giants called 75 RPOs, which averaged five yards per play.
This summer, it looked like the Giants might make RPOs a staple of their offense, and why not? Jones has that fine mobility that one might argue has been underutilized thus far in his NFL career.
So why haven’t the RPOs made their way more often into the regular-season?
“I think typically there is a lot of stuff that you put in over the course of training camp that you like. Maybe you don’t like certain things each week,” Garrett explained this week.
“Obviously, we game plan for opponents. We try to go into the plays that we have both in the run game and in the pass game that we think are appropriate to attack a particular defense.”
(For those not familiar with what an RPO is, Chiefs offensive lineman Mitchell Schwartz offered a straightforward explanation in a Tweet.)
The RPO creates headaches for the defense who must anticipate both the run and the pass, but for an RPO to work, the offensive line must engage in run blocking, which for the Giants so far this season has been spotty.
That's to be expected considering the Giants offensive line has three new starters and no off-season behind them, unlike the Cowboys, who have fielded one of the better offensive lines in the last few seasons.
The second thing is that the quarterback has to quickly read the defender's reaction and decide whether to run or throw the ball.
That last part has also appeared to be inconsistent for the Giants. For as much progress as Jones has made from his rookie season to now, one ongoing glitch that hasn’t entirely been eradicated from his game is the speed in which he processes what he’s seeing and reacting accordingly.
Jones, for the most part, has done a good job with getting the ball out of his hand and to the right receivers after a little more than a dozen NFL starts. But there have been some instances where he didn’t expedite the decision-making process, resulting in the crease or window that was initially there disappearing.
“We have a long way to go offensively, we all know that,” Garrett said. “We have to get better running it, get better throwing it. Some of those ‘deceptives,’ when they fit into the plan, we’ll certainly use them going forward.”
