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The New York Giants’ defense is hot. They are returning to the form that made them a top 10 defense last year, allowing opponents an average of just 13 point per game over their last three.
The season started off pretty scary however, with the Giants at the bottom of the league in many key defensive categories and allowing opponents an average of 29.5 points per game over their first six games.
One of the major issues was missed tackles and missed assignments. That’s calmed down over the last month, even without some of the team’s top performers such as inside linebacker Blake Martinez and safety Jabrill Peppers.
Veteran safety Logan Ryan, the team’s top tackler this season, still identifies tackling as one of the areas he wants to see the defense improved upon.
“I feel pretty good,” Ryan told reporters on Tuesday when asked where he felt the defense was at the team’s bye week.
“I think the areas that I’ve talked about before — red area, third down, keeping those points down, two-minute — I think those are areas of emphasis and areas we improved on. I still think we can improve our tackling. We’ve been getting more turnovers, which is always the goal of defense, to get them off the field and make them kick field goals if they’re in that position and get the ball.
“We’ve been doing a better job of that and we’ve got to continue doing that. Speaking to Derek Carr a lot and Marcus Mariota, who I’m close friends with, they had trouble with our disguise, so I think that’s getting better and that just takes time to work on that. We saw that kind of happen last year as the season progressed. It just takes reps with the unit to work on disguise to make it better and make it hard on these really good quarterbacks. We’ve had a stretch of a bunch of them lately”
It’s not the greatest point of the season for the Giants to have their bye as they are playing much better of late. They face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday night after the bye. The Bucs lead the NFL in scoring, averaging 32.5 points per game this year.
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