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Giants Defensive Line Must Find a Way to Be Great Without Jason Pierre-Paul
- Updated: December 8, 2016
Jason Pierre-Paul slipped quietly through the Giants locker room after a walkthrough practice last week. He stopped at his corner locker, posed for some promotional photographs holding a newspaper announcing his NFC Defensive Player of the Week selection, then vanished as stealthily as he had arrived. No interviews. No brouhaha.
The Giants were on a six-game winning streak. JPP earned his Player of the Week award with three sacks and a snatch-and-score fumble recovery against the Browns. With 11 sacks in two weeks, the Giants pass rush was beating opponents almost single-handedly. It was time to coronate the 2016 Giants defensive line as rightful heirs to the 2007 and 2011 lines, the ones that propelled otherwise-unimpressive Giants teams to the Super Bowl and proved to be Tom Brady Kryptonite.
But JPP, less boisterous with the media this year than he was before the 2015 injury which cost him two fingers and the often-invasive coverage that followed it, would not be part of the festivities.
It turned out to be an omen. JPP suffered an injury early in a sloppy Giants loss to the Steelers. He underwent season-ending sports hernia surgery Wednesday. His charmed Comeback Player of the Year bid was over, and the Giants’ hopes of riding their defensive front four to another shocking Super Bowl surge are in severe jeopardy.
The Giants suddenly need a miracle just to hang with the Cowboys on Sunday night, let alone make any noise if and when they reach the postseason. But Giants defensive lines have a long history of overcoming long odds and turning doubters into believers.
Glue and Snowballs
Damon “Big Snacks” Harrison began his Giants career as a Pierre-Paul skeptic. “I was one of the ones who wanted to wait and see myself,” Harrison said of his initial feelings toward JPP.
Everything about this Giants defensive line, from the start of free agency through the first month of the season, invited skepticism. Having finished last in the NFL in yards allowed in 2015, the team re-signed JPP to a one-year contract with almost $10 million in guarantees, even though he provided just one sack in half a season in 2015. They then dropped a five-year, $24 million guaranteed deal on Harrison and a whopping $40 million guaranteed contract on edge-rusher Olivier Vernon. It was a risky trio of expenditures with high backfire potential for a normally frugal organization.
Long before the pricey line began paying dividends, Harrison became a JPP believer. “From the very first day I met him, he didn’t let the injury or anything else affect him,” Harrison said last week. “He’s proven everybody to be wrong.”
“He’s throwing linemen around out there with the hand, too, if you’re watching,” Harrison added before the injury. Indeed, JPP’s confidence in his damaged hand—ripping away from defenders, elevating to deflect passes, swiping fumbles before they hit the ground—was a major part of his resurgence and a catalyst for much of what the Giants line has accomplished.
But if JPP’s bounce-back was the Giants’ biggest surprise, Harrison may have been their biggest revelation, as well as their wisest investment. And now he must replace Pierre-Paul as a leader and tone-setter, if not a sack-generator.
“He’s been a key component to the way this thing has jelled together,” defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo said of Harrison. “And I’m not talking about when he’s out on the field as much as when he’s off the field.
“He’s been the glue. He’s been the guy who can get guys to refocus. You need somebody in the group who can do that, and he’s been that guy.”
Oddly enough, Spagnuolo wasn’t expecting a team leader when the Giants signed Harrison. “I didn’t know him as a person,” he said. “We had an idea of the type of person he was. But we really just saw what was on film and hoped for the best on the other things.”
The Giants discovered they had both a positive locker room presence and an interior defender capable of transitioning smoothly from a 3-4 defense to their 4-3 scheme. Pro Bowl-bound second-year safety Landon Collins went so far as to call Snacks the Giants’ defensive MVP. “It’s a lie,” Snacks quipped when told of Collins’ remark.
Vernon offered a more measured assessment of Snacks’ impact. “It’s a chain reaction,” he said. “A snowball effect. What he does helps the linebackers, and so on.”
That snowball did not start rolling, though, until midway through the season. The Giants recorded four measly sacks in their first five games. It looked like they squandered $75 million on a guy with a permanent injury, a tackle they knew little about and the third-most heralded player on the Dolphins defensive line.
But the Giants went on to record 23 sacks in their next seven games, with the pass rush often taking …
