EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — A good night nearly became a special one for the New York Giants defense, but fate had other ideas.
In the final minutes of Sunday night’s game at MetLife Stadium, it looked like the Giants defense had done it again. After holding the Cincinnati Bengals offense — a unit that had entered Sunday averaging 35 points per game over their past three games — to just 10 points, the Giants needed their defense to stand tall one more time. Could they find it within themselves to get one last stop and give quarterback Daniel Jones and Co. a chance to mount a comeback drive?
They came so close.
With just over two minutes to go in the game and the Bengals facing first-and-10 from the Giants’ 30-yard line, New York linebacker Micah McFadden knocked the ball out of the hands of Bengals running back Chase Brown. The fumbled ball bounced across the turf, and it looked like Giants safety Jason Pinnock had a chance to recover, but his diving attempt came up empty as the ball ricocheted toward the sideline.
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Giants cornerback Cord’Dale Flott dove to try and keep the ball in bounds, but he was too late. It crossed the white of the sideline, and the play was dead — the Bengals retained possession.
Safety Tyler Nubin put his hands on his helmet, the apparent disbelief a shared feeling among everyone watching the play transpire.
Perhaps the bad break was enough to rip the heart out of a tenacious Giants defense because, on the very next play, Brown gashed New York for a 30-yard touchdown run up the middle to effectively seal the Bengals’ 17-7 win and the Giants’ 2-4 start to the season.
“If we want to be an elite defense and live up to who we say we are, we have to make those plays,” Giants edge rusher Brian Burns said after the game. “When that ball came out, that’s a ball we have to get. Simple as that. We had the opportunity. It was on the ground.”
It was no doubt a frustrating end for a defense that deserved better. The way the Giants defense played Sunday night, it deserved to leave MetLife with a win. But that wasn’t possible after the putrid Giants offense mustered just seven points.
Still, the defense’s performance shouldn’t be overlooked. It held the high-octane Bengals offense to their second-lowest yardage output (309) of the season; it got off the field — Cincinnati converted just 4-of-11 third downs — and harassed quarterback Joe Burrow (four sacks and seven QB hits). It limited the Bengals all-star duo at wide receiver, Ja’Marr Chase (five catches, 72 yards) and Tee Higgins (seven catches, 77 yards), to mostly low-impact plays.
No, the Giants defense did its job Sunday and did it well. And while it’d be unfair to say the Giants offense has been bad all season — it’s more accurate to say it’s struggled with consistency — it’s becoming clear which side of the ball can be counted on week to week to deliver. Even amid injuries messing with depth and rotations, Shane Bowen’s defense has now held opponents to 21 points or fewer in five straight games.
This week, the Giants had to overcome the loss of edge rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux, who landed on injured reserve after undergoing surgery on his right wrist.
But the defense didn’t skip a beat. Azeez Ojulari, the 2021 second-rounder playing in a contract season, entered the started lineup and delivered one of the best games of his career. He sacked Burrow twice, nearly added a third, and totaled six pressures on 26 pass-rush snaps (23%). Sunday was Ojulari’s fourth career game with at least two sacks, and it was his highest pressure rate generated in a game since Week 18 of 2021 (23.1 percent), according to NFL Pro.
Two sacks in less than two minutes for Azeez Ojulari 🔥
🎥 @NFL pic.twitter.com/XIWKktSg7l
— The Athletic NFL (@TheAthleticNFL) October 14, 2024
“I thought Azeez was electric,” linebacker Bobby Okereke said. “He showed up.”
Ojulari wasn’t the only edge menace for the Giants. Burns added eight tackles, including a sack, to go along with four pressures, highlighted by a huge hit on Burrow that forced a pivotal third-down incompletion in the fourth quarter.
Brian Burns. Disruptive 😤
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📱: Stream on #NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/c5S4yybW0T— NFL (@NFL) October 14, 2024
Combined with Dexter Lawrence’s continued excellence — he picked up his seventh sack of the year despite being double-teamed regularly Sunday night — and you’ve got a defense that is making life miserable for quarterbacks on a weekly basis.
Consider what the Giants did to one at the top of his game. According to NFL Pro, they almost completely eliminated Burrow’s ability to attack downfield Sunday night. Burrow completed every pass in the quick game, but he went 7-of-16 for 109 yards (-2.7% CPOE/completion percentage over expected) when holding the ball for longer than 2.5 seconds. Burrow averaged his second-longest time to throw of his career (3.10 seconds) as he faced 16 pressures, per NFL Pro.
“They’re the real deal, and they didn’t have one of their guys today,” Burrow said, referring to Thibodeaux. “They’ve got good games. They’ve got good players. They made it tough on us, and their secondary was sticking coverage all day. It’s a good defense.”
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Up until that late Brown touchdown, the defense made very few mistakes. The biggest, however, was that 47-yard Burrow touchdown run on the Bengals’ opening drive. With the defense focused on taking away the receiving options to Burrow’s left, the quarterback broke free to the right for the longest touchdown run by a Giants opponent QB since 1942.
“That can be demoralizing,” Burns said of Burrow’s scamper. “(But) the way (the defense) bounced back and the way we responded, that’s how you’re supposed to do it.”
Obviously, close is never good enough in the NFL. For as good as the Giants defense was, the players know they can be better. The Burrow run, the Chase touchdown, those are the plays that are going to fuel them to improve. Still, it’s hard not to be encouraged by the what the defense has showed lately. While certainly not an elite unit (yet, anyway), the defenses is proving it can stymie even the NFL’s best offenses and keep the Giants in games every week.
“This is a good performance. It’s not the standard,” Burns said. “Like I said, certain opportunities that we (can) still get. You never want to be complacent. If there’s more plays to make, we should make them.”
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(Photo: Robert Deutsch / Imagn Images)
