Giants' Bobby Okereke-Shane Bowen connection holds key to defensive success
Giants linebacker Bobby Okereke, right, and defensive coordinator Shane Bowen, inset. Credit: Ed Murray
This is the time of year when all the really important connections on the football field are made. It’s why so many eyeballs have been focused on how Daniel Jones has been delivering his passes to Malik Nabers. It’s why the offensive line, shuffled on a near daily basis so far through Giants training camp, is striving for consistency in performance and personnel. Every position has to work in conjunction with at least one other, and with just over a month left before the start of the regular season, all those cams, gears and pistons need to start working in unison.
One of the most important of those relationships may also be the least visible and therefore hardest to gauge. It’s the one between middle linebacker Bobby Okereke and new defensive coordinator Shane Bowen. Those two will need to be in lockstep together for the defense to operate as it is designed. They need to recognize and react in the same way, begin thinking and processing not as two men but as one entity.
“With that position, you want to be on the same page,” Bowen said. “You want to make sure that he sees things the same way you do in terms of concept, scheme … You want to have that leadership from that position, obviously, because he touches everybody. The front, the back end, he's involved with all of them.”
So how is that going so far? Still a work in progress, the two of them indicated as each spoke Thursday.
At least they seem to agree on that. It’s a start!
“It’s a growing relationship,” Okereke said. “Shane has to get to know me. I’ve got to get to know him. How we're going to be in stressful situations as the plays go on. But I think we're developing a great rapport.”
“I think that will grow as we go in terms of why calls are being made in certain situations,” Bowen added of their all-important attachment.
Bowen said he has been impressed by the questions Okereke has been asking him. Eventually he wants Okereke to not only regurgitate the calls on the field but also comprehend the reasoning behind them. That is an important skill for all of the players on the field, Bowen said, but it will be essential for Okereke.
“When you understand the why, you understand the strengths of it, you understand the weaknesses of it,” Bowen said. “There's a little bit more buy-in. Like I mentioned in the spring, it's not the call, it's about being able to go out there and execute the call and why we're calling it and what we're looking to get out of each individual call.”
Okereke said he likes Bowen’s style so far.
“He's very detailed,” he said. “He's dogmatic. He'll coach anybody, from (Brian) Burns to Dex (Dexter Lawrence) to me. He'll hold anybody accountable, and I think that'll be a strength of our defense.”
Last year, in his first season with the Giants, Okereke had to forge a similar training camp relationship with his defensive coordinator Wink Martindale on the fly. It’s no secret how quickly and how closely those two bonded and it led to a standout season for Okereke (although a rather awkward and unceremonious departure for Martindale). They had the benefit, though, of it being Martindale’s second year with the team so at least many of the other defenders had a grasp on what was expected from them.
Now Okereke and the entire unit are having to adjust to an entirely new system, new philosophy, and new voice in his green-dotted helmet when the calls come in from the sideline. Okereke called it a “reprogramming.”
“Obviously, me and Wink had a great rapport last year,” he said. “So, just working to develop that again.”
The Giants have a long history of epic, legendary connections between coordinator and linebacker going all the way back to Sam Huff and Tom Landry, up to Bill Belichick and Harry Carson, and onward to Steve Spagnuolo and Antonio Pierce. While defense has been the cornerstone of just about every Giants championship in the past 70 years, that bond between the play-caller on the sideline and the one in the huddle has been the mortar that held those groups together.
Now Bowen and Okereke are in the process of trying to create their own such chemistry.
It’s not a given that they’ll ever get there, to the point where they are two entities with one finish-each-others’-sentence brain. But how quickly they can meld their synapses together in the coming weeks will go a long way toward determining how well this Giants defense – and by extension the whole Giants team – functions during this upcoming season.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
