What Cornerback Isaac Yiadom Brings to the Giants Defense
After two underwhelming seasons with the Denver Broncos, defensive back Isaac Yiadom is getting a new start with the Giants.
Yiadom, a third-round draft pick (No. 99 overall) out of Boston College in 2018, was praised for his length and physicality as a prospect. His leadership characteristics also made him very attractive from a locker-room perspective.
But more importantly, Yiadom appeared to be a perfect fit for the Broncos defense at the time, which, under head coach Vance Joseph, a defensive-minded coach, ran more man-to-man coverage scheme that fed into Yiadom's strengths.
Despite there appearing to be a match made in heaven between Yiadom and the Broncos, he struggled to produce. As a rookie, Yiadom allowed 58.3% of the pass targets against him to be complete for 258 yards and three touchdowns. He recorded just one interception and had three passes defensed.
When Joseph and his staff were replaced din 2019 by Vic Fangio, the defensive scheme changed to more of a complex zone scheme in which Yiadom ended up getting burned for big chunks of yardage in coverage.
But that was only part of Yiadom's undoing. According to Broncos Maven Chad Jensen, because the cornerback was like a fish out of water, other parts of his game began to unravel.
"What really killed his starting role were the untimely and inopportune penalties," Jensen told Giants Country. "He lost his starting job to Davontae Harris for six weeks, only to get it back on the tail-end of the season when Denver ran out of cornerback options.
In that complex zone coverage scheme, Yiadom allowed 70.4% of the pass targets against him to be complete for 490 yards. Although he didn't give up any touchdowns in coverage, he also didn't have any interceptions and managed to break up just one more pass (four) than he did as a rookie when he had three.
Getting back to the penalties, Yiadom recorded nine penalties for 87 yards in his two years in Denver, five of them coming last season and four of those five resulting in first downs for the opponent.
Despite all that history, the Giants, who appear to favor more of a press-man type of scheme, see value in Yiadom's skillset.
During defensive coordinator Patrick Graham's time in Miami running Brian Flores' vision for the defense, Graham deployed a Cover-1 defense (single high safety) on 491 of the Dolphins' 1,116 defensive snaps.
"The coaches obviously liked other corners on the depth chart more than he and thus, Yiadom became expendable," Jensen noted. "He's still got some good football left in him. The right coaching could bring it out of him and the right scheme."
Will that be the Giants, who gave up a seventh-round draft pick in 2021 to acquire Yiadom?
Stay tuned.
