New York Giants tight end Evan Engram (88) cannot come up with the touchdown pass with pressure from Cleveland Browns safety Karl Joseph (42) during a game at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, December 20, 2020, in East Rutherford. — Danielle Parhizkaran/NorthJersey.com via Imagn Content Services, LLC

Giants Hoping to Get Accurate Gauge of Progress vs. Browns This Week

The preseason game against the Browns won't count, but the work the Giants expect to get this week in the joint practices and the game will go a long way toward indicating just where the Giants are at this summer.

Author:
Patricia Traina
Publish date:
Aug 19, 2021 10:00 AM EDT

With all due respect to the Jets, who topped the Giants last week in the preseason opener, that was with a new team under a new head coach that had nowhere to go but up.

The Giants? They didn't finish that much better off than the Jets, especially on offense. After upgrading both sides of the ball in the off-season, the hope is that the Giants will be deemed worthy of being on the same field as a playoff-caliber team that last year fell to the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Divisional Playoffs.

Giants head coach Joe Judge and his Browns counterpart (and one-time high school teammate), Kevin Stefanski, will pit their respective teams against each other this week in a controlled environment designed to be competitive yet focused on keeping the players safe.

Although the practices will be missing tackling and bone-crunching hits normally found in a regular-season game, that doesn't mean that the action will be any less intense.

Despite missing most of its starters in last week's loss to the Jets, the Giants offense has had its good days and bad ones this summer. But offensive coordinator Jason Garrett hopes to see the entire unit, as led by quarterback Daniel Jones who is playing behind a still relatively young offensive line, start stacking more good days than bad ones.

“It’ll be a good challenge for us with the guys they have on their defense and their defensive scheme, so we’ll go run our offense against them,” said offensive coordinator Jason Garrett.

“The guys who were available, let’s take advantage of that opportunity. The guys who aren’t available, stay close to it and try to learn what you can from the situation that you’re in. So continue to try to grow, continue to try to stack good days on top of each other.”

Garrett will undoubtedly be looking to see how well the Giants offensive line holds up against Cleveland's defense, which will likely be without defensive ends Myles Garrett and Jadeveon Clowney, both of whom have been dealing with injuries this summer.

Jones, who has never before taken part in a joint practice, will also show any improvement in his mental processing and recognition of the defenses against a very good Browns defensive secondary.

Garrett said the offense is excited about the challenge regardless of who is out there for the Browns.

“You go against other people, you hit other people, you see different systems,” he said. “It’s naturally a little bit more uncomfortable. You don’t know how the other guys are, what the systems are, what the schemes are, so everybody has to respond to that and that’s a great opportunity to grow. I think it will be a good week for us in Cleveland."

Defensively, the Giants will square off against one of the league's playoff offenses from last season as led by quarterback Baker Mayfield.

"I think the challenge with Cleveland, they have a lot of good players," said Giants defensive coordinator Patrick Graham.

"The first thing I'm going to do when we start to talk about Cleveland is ID the players, before we even get to the game plan. You’ve got to know who the backs are, the tight ends, the o-line, the quarterback, the receivers. They're all going to present different challenges."

The Browns had the third-best rushing offense last season, averaging nearly 5.0 yards per carry.

As led by Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt running behind one of the better offensive lines in football, that group should offer a good test for the Giants run defense, which lost Dalvin Tomlinson, an underrated player and beast against the run, via free agency.

Graham, who in the past has spoken about his concern about defending the run, didn't want to get into discussing Tomlinson's departure but instead reminded people that one man doesn't necessarily make or break a run defense.

"To defend the run, it takes more than one person, I know that. There are 11 guys out there, we got to defend all those gaps, get off those blocks," he said.

"Whether it's (defensive lineman) Austin (Johnson), (defensive lineman Dexter) Dexter (Lawrence), (defensive end Leonard) Leo (Williams) (linebacker) Blake (Martinez), (cornerback James Bradberry) JB, (defensive back) Adoree' (Jackson), we can't give a one-for-one in the run game."