Big Blue View mailbag: Lefty kickers, PFF grades, John Harbaugh, more

Jim Eggers asks: Two of the many shortcomings of Dabs and his staff were:

1. game preparation (both physically and mentally) and 2. player development. The players were rarely ready to play come game day. They started slow and had to play catch up. I feel this is a bye-product of the country club atmosphere of Dabs’ camp and in-season practice sessions, lack of discipline. Further, I find it impossible to name more than one player who has improved during their early year(s) as a Giant. There are several who have regressed, Banks, Nubin, JMS, Phillips, Neal, Thibs, Johnson, Hyatt, Muasau….there are more. Several departing players have improved substantially. Hopefully these areas will be corrected under Harbaugh. What’s is your level of confidence that they will?

Ed says: Harbaugh has an old-school attitude, and a track record as a successful head coach. His teams had three losing seasons in 18 years with the Baltimore Ravens. Preparation will not be an issue.

Now, does that mean the Giants will come flying out of the game and beat the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Rams the first two weeks? No, it doesn’t. This will be a new team with new schemes and you never know. I do, though, feel better about their chance to be ready on a weekly basis than I have in a while.

As for development, part of that is on the players themselves. Still, Harbaugh is a veteran coach with an accomplished staff. Again, I feel better because they have a track record of success.

Bob Donnelly asks: Much has been made about how the Giants are quickly becoming the Ravens north.
Comparing the Ravens ’25 offense to the unit being assembled in East Rutherford the new unit pales in comparison.

Going up the spine:

Center: Linderbaum vs. JMS
QB: Jackson vs. Dart
FB: Ricard vs. Ricard
RB: King Henry vs. Skattebo
Etc.

I’m not sure if there’s any position where Harbaugh’s new offensive squad is better than his previous one.
With this in mind what do you view as a reasonable expectation for the Giants offense in the upcoming season?

Ed says: Bob, I am not sure what the point is in comparing Harbaugh’s Ravens’ roster to the current Giants’ roster. I can’t argue with your assessment — that’s an accomplished Baltimore team.

I would argue that what matters is whether or not Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy can make the Giants a better offense than they were in 2025. They were actually a pretty good one last season, even without Malik Nabers and Cam Skattebo.

Can they help Jaxson Dart become the quarterback his rookie season hinted he might be able to be? Dart still has a lot to learn and prove, and the Giants have a veteran group of coaches and a bolstered supporting cast to help him.

Will the additions of wide receivers Darnell Mooney and Calvin Austin, tight end Isaiah Likely, and fullback Patrick Ricard pay off. Will Sisi Mauigoa and Malachi Fields be the players the Giants think they can be?

The Giants averaged 22.4 points per game last season, 16th in the NFL and their best since the 2018 Giants averaged 23.1 points per game. Can they meet or exceed that total?

The reality is that offense wasn’t the Giants’ biggest issue a year ago. I always say when you hit the league midpoint in scoring, and the Giants were the midpoint in 2025, you should have a chance to win most of your games. It was the defense that let the Giants down more often than not in 2025.

Dart’s development is the big thing on offense. If he takes a step forward, the offense will follow.

Improvements on defense and more consistency in the kicking game, though, have to happen if the Giants are going to be better.

Walter Recher asks: I’ve wanted to ask you this question for some time now, it’s about helping us better understand PFF as a resource to rank player performance and evaluate it for the Giants and other teams.

Whenever I look at a player’s rating it is hard to gauge their past performance as an indicator of what they might bring. I understand of course no evaluation is any kind of a total measurement but let’s look at an example – Tremaine Edmunds finishing 2025 with a 61.0 PFF overall grade and a 53.0 PFF coverage grade. While his coverage performance remained inconsistent, he improved significantly against the run, producing a career-best 81.1 PFF run-defense grade.” It seems his coverage grade has an oversized impact on his overall rating.

Also, he comes to the Giants ranked 34th out of 88 LBs. What does this even mean? Obviously there are 32 teams, and assuming two LBs per team, is that meant to say out of 64 starters he is middle of the pack overall? And Arvell Reese with a 76.2 PFF was ranked 162 out of 809, which would rank him at the bottom of the top 20%. Clearly who you play against is not any kind of measure.

Please share further insight particularly the PFF rankings and other evaluation resources you have found to be most helpful for us fans to better understand it.

Ed says: Walter, I think everyone who has followed Big Blue View for the last several years has a pretty good idea how I am going to answer this question. And, should know exactly how I am going to open this discussion.

Pro Football Focus is not the be-all and end-all that decides how good a player is or is not. It is a tool, a highly-flawed one at that, and I understand why people obsess over it. For a long time, it was the only game in town, and the only measure fans had of looking to find some analytical measure of how players were performing. Pro Football and Sports Network now offers a grading system of its own, and the two often differ.

Pr0 Football Focus graders do not know the play call and the exact assignment of each player on any given snap, and they certainly don’t know how players are coached to react to certain situations. They are guessing based on their knowledge of the game, and on what they believe they are seeing. So, too, are PFSN graders.

Edmunds happens to be a great example of the subjectivity of those grades and how graders weight what they see can impact scores.

PFF sees Edmunds’ play as mediocre overall, although it does have him 15th among 59 off-ball linebackers against the run last season.

Pro Football and Sports Network? PFSN grades Edmunds as the sixth-best off-ball linebacker in the NFL last season, and his 89.3 “Impact Score” was the best of his career.

The rankings are just the vertical list of the subjective grades. I think over a full season they might tell us whether a player has done very well or very poorly, and over the course of a career you can see success or struggle. But, I can’t put a ton of stock in “Player A is better than Player B because his PFF grade is two points higher.”

Teams have their own ways of grading players, and we are not privy to those.

I hope this helps a little bit.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Edmunds is a great player. He has size, athleticism, and experience that appeal to John Harbaugh and Dennard Wilson, and they believe his skillset is more what they want in the middle than Bobby Okereke’s was.

Kölnerbigblue asks: Ed, how difficult is it for a holder who is used to holding for right hand kickers to switch sides? Is that a disadvantage to having a lefty kickers (i.e. Sauls)?

Ed says: Kolner, it is a little bit like moving from the right side of the offensive line to the left side. Same skill set, same techniques, same plays, same job. It is just that everything is done in the opposite direction, and it takes time and repititions to get comfortable.

The holder is on the opposite knee, then catching and placing the ball with the opposite hands. The kicker is also coming from the opposite direction. There are also adjustments for the snapper. I asked former Giants long snapper Casey Kreiter about this at the end of last season, and he gave an excellent, in-depth answer.

“I think it’s just the operation as a whole, right?,” Kreiter said. “The holder’s catching it from a different side of his body than he’s used to, probably than he’s done his entire career. So that may change where he catches the ball.

“And if we’re changing distances where we’re catching the ball, it can mess up the laces. Batteries spend a lot of time working, hey, where do I need to grip the ball? How do I need to spin the ball?

So when the holder catches it, laces are facing 12 [o’clock]. That’s part of my job as a snapper, and I take that part seriously. And when you flip a guy from catching it one way to a different way, some of that changes.

“And it took some time, just lots and lots of reps.”

A left-footed placekicker is not a disadvantage. A kicker who can’t make kicks or stay healthy is a disadvantage. Getting the operation right just takes some extra work on the part of the snapper and holder.