The New York Giants hold the No. 4 overall selection in April’s NFL Draft and since there is no clear cut player staring them in the face, they could go in a number of directions with the pick.
Much of the Giants’ strategy will depend on the demand by the teams drafting around them of some of the young quarterbacks available in this class.
LSU quarterback Joe Burrow, the Heisman Trophy winner and MVP of the National Championship Game, is favored to be the first player selected in the draft by Cincinnati. Washington and Detroit hold the second and third picks and are not expected to be in the market for a quarterback.
That leaves the Giants with a big decision to make. Stand pat at No. 4 and pull the trigger on the best available player or entertain trade offers from teams scrambling to move up in the draft to grab a quarterback.
Trading back is not the Giants’ way and is certainly not something general manager Dave Gettleman is prone to do on draft day.
Gettleman has presided over seven drafts as a general manager — five with the Panthers and two with the Giants — and has never traded down. Never. He selected 28 players with the Panthers and 16 in his two drafts with the Giants (plus one more in the supplemental draft). However: Gettleman’s new head coach, Joe Judge, was shaken off the Bill Belichick tree in New England, and no one is more aggressive trading down in drafts than Belichick.
The other x-factor is the health of one of the draft’s most coveted players – Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, once considered the jewel of the class until he dislocated and fractured a hip in November, sending his draft stock tumbling.
If teams feel Tua has recovered to the point where he is his old self, that could create a scramble to the top of the draft. The Giants, as illustrated above, would be one of the teams that would benefit.
Since they will not select a quarterback themselves, it only makes sense to listen to the offers. But first, Tua must prove his health is no longer an issue.
Reports state his three-month CT scan revealed his hip has healed. Tagovailoa will not participate in drills at the combine but will use the week in Indy to meet with teams and explain his physical progress. For many, many players, this flow of medical information is the most important single aspect of the combine.
“I’ll be participating in the combine, but my main goal is not to win the 40, not to win the bench press, but to win my medical,” Tagovailoa recently told NFL Network.
Naturally, the Combine will not tell his story. Teams will need to see with their own eyes if Tua is back and that probably won’t happen until his pro day and/or private workouts.
The result could have the Giants lucking into Ohio State edge rusher Chase Young or a package of players/picks that Gettleman can’t turn down.