The Three Stooges

No, not Moe, Larry and Curly.  Jacksonville, Tennessee and Washington.  The Giants play 3 bottom-feeders the next 3 games.  Now that they are officially eliminated with Detroit’s Turkey Day win over powerhouse Chicago, we get to see how the 1-eyed man beats on the blind.  Fewell’s defense enjoys preying on the weak Offense and the weak QB.  In the next 3 weeks, they will face rookie Blake Bortles, rookie Zach Mettenberger and Colt McCoy.  That’s enough weakness for the Giants to find an opportunity to collect 2 if not 3 consecutive wins.  Just do yourself a favor and don’t get too excited if this team is 6-8 and “on the rebound.” They have already been measured and they came up short.  Maybe we can glean something from the tests against STL and PHL the last 2 weeks of the season, but do not measure anything in the next 3 games… other than the Giants ability to compete vs the dregs.

As I stated after last week, I will be watching individual players more than anything else.  I am curious to see today, as an example, whether Damontre Moore will be able to do more with a lot of snaps.  Kiwanuka is not making the trip to Jacksonville, so we are looking forward to seeing what the 2nd year DE can do.  He got 1 sack in 6 snaps last week.  According to PFF, he has 3 sacks, 7 QB hits, and 9 QB hurries in 167 snaps.    Let’s look at the gold standard, JJ Watt.  Mind you, Watt is frequently double-teamed, chipped and generally schemed against directly in offensive gameplans.  With that said, he still has 10 sacks, 29 QB hits and 31 QB hurries in 754 snaps.  If we look at only the pass rush snaps, he has 445 snaps.  And comparatively, Moore has 116 pass rush snaps.  So Watt has ~4 times as many pass rush snaps.  When we normalize the data…

NOOO. I am not saying Moore is Watt.  The conclusion here is that Moore has upside and simply needs to be evaluated in the productivity per snap.  As I have stated in the past, Moore will be the first one to tell you he needs to do a lot better vs the run.  That is why the Giants have not given him more snaps.  And he probably is making mistakes in his pass rush assignments (ie contain, stunts etc.) too.  In limited duty, you have to look at the number of snaps and see that Moore’s numbers are pretty good.  If you gave Watt just those juicy pass rush situations, he’d get to the QB more than 16% of the time.  But that 16% number is still a solid number, and I’d like to see that ratio kept up in larger snap counts today.  Separately, as a point of reference, JPP 9%, Robert Ayers is 18%. Hankins at 11% is excellent for a Defensive Lineman.  Speaking of Defensive Linemen, the Jaguars have two of the better ones in the NFL in Ryan Davis and Sen’Derrick Marks.  They are ordinary run defenders but vs the pass they have strong stats at 11% and 9% respectively.