Giants Keeping the Playbook Vanilla Until Week 1

The preseason hasn’t exactly given Giants fans an exciting look at Matt Nagy’s offense. The running game has been basic, the play calling has been predictable, and there haven’t been many wrinkles to get excited about. But the New York Giants vanilla offense is hiding something bigger, or at least that’s what we’re hoping to see when the regular season begins.

At times, watching the Giants run the football has felt like playing an old game of Tecmo Bowl. Up and A. Right and B. Pick a direction, hand the ball off and see what happens. That’s obviously an exaggeration, but there hasn’t been much creativity on display. Maybe that’s exactly the point, and the Giants are perfectly content with keeping things simple until the games actually count.

The Giants Aren’t Giving Dallas Much to Study

There is very little benefit to putting your entire offense on film during games that don’t count, especially when the Dallas Cowboys are waiting in Week 1. John Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy know Dallas will study every formation, personnel grouping and tendency the Giants have shown throughout the preseason. If there are concepts Nagy believes can give the Cowboys problems, why give them an early look?

The Giants can still evaluate their offensive line, running backs and blocking schemes without opening up the entire playbook. They can find out whether players are executing their assignments, winning individual matchups and functioning within the offense while keeping the more creative concepts behind closed doors. Preseason football is about preparing your team, not necessarily showing everyone else what you’ve been preparing.

That’s why the simplicity of the offense shouldn’t automatically be viewed as a negative. If the Giants have spent the summer installing a much larger system than what we’ve seen during the preseason, keeping it under wraps could ultimately work to their advantage against Dallas.

But Could the Giants Have Shown a Little More?

There is another side to the argument. Nobody is asking Nagy to hand Dallas the Week 1 game plan, but there could be some value in putting a few wrinkles on film and forcing the Cowboys to prepare for possibilities that the Giants may never even use against them.

We haven’t seen much play action or misdirection. Why not show play action off one of those basic runs, use some pre-snap movement or run something unexpected out of a formation you’ve repeatedly used to run the football? You don’t even have to go back to it once the regular season begins. Sometimes simply putting something on film is enough to make a defense spend valuable preparation time worrying about it.

Now a linebacker can’t immediately attack the run without considering what could be developing behind him. A defensive back has another possibility to think about, and the Cowboys have one more concept to account for during the week. The Giants wouldn’t have to reveal much, just enough to create a little uncertainty.

Matt Nagy’s Real Giants Offense Is Still a Mystery

After an entire preseason, we still don’t really know what Nagy’s Giants offense is going to look like when the games matter, and that’s what makes Week 1 so interesting. What we’ve seen so far may only represent the foundation of the system rather than the finished product.

Once the regular season begins, we should get a much better idea of how Nagy plans to use different formations, personnel packages, play action and pre-snap movement to create favorable matchups. There should be another layer to what the Giants have been installing throughout the summer, and the biggest question is how much they’re intentionally keeping hidden until Dallas.

That’s also why it is difficult to make any sweeping judgments about the offense based strictly on the preseason. The Giants haven’t needed to game plan the same way they will during the regular season, and Nagy hasn’t needed to reach very deep into his playbook. That changes immediately in Week 1.

Vanilla by Design or Cause for Concern?

There is a major difference between running a vanilla offense because you don’t want to show anything and running a vanilla offense because you don’t have anything else to show. We’ll start finding out which one applies to the Giants when they face Dallas.

For now, keeping the playbook relatively closed makes sense. The Giants don’t receive any extra points for running their best plays in August, and Dallas doesn’t need any additional help preparing for the season opener. At the same time, after watching such a basic offense throughout the preseason, expectations are going to be higher when Nagy finally gets to call a game that matters.

If the Giants come out in Week 1 using different formations, play action, motion and a more creative running attack, we’ll know the preseason was exactly what we thought it was: vanilla by design. Let Dallas spend its time preparing for the offense the Giants showed all summer, then give them something completely different when the games count.