Tight end zone: Giants scored by drafting Daniel Bellinger

The Giants put surprisingly little time and effort into naming the play.

They just called it “Bellinger pass,” which sounds more like the wagon route homesteaders might take to avoid a mountain range than one of the team’s more creative offensive calls of the season.

Daniel Jones took the snap and pitched the ball to Saquon Barkley, who then pitched it to rookie tight end Daniel Bellinger, who had the option to throw it back to Jones in the end zone. With Jones covered, Bellinger tucked the ball away and ran the several yards himself for a touchdown in last week’s win over the Packers in London.

So not only is it a boring name, but “Bellinger pass” wasn’t even a pass. Oh, well.

But for all the lack of imagination that went into deciding what to call the play, the real vision and cleverness was in finding Bellinger to begin with.

That’s a process that began last year when he was playing for San Diego State and Giants scouts first saw him in action. Not that there was much to go by then. He was a big guy, 6-6 and 255 pounds, and he could block, but he never really had much of a chance to show off any athleticism in the passing game. He caught 31 passes as a senior.

From that two-dimensional existence, though, the Giants were able to conjure the vision of a three-dimensional player who could wind up becoming one of their top rookies in this draft class, one of the best rookie tight ends in the league and maybe even a muse for the team’s play-designers.

“You use your players to their strengths and use them to the best of their ability,” said offensive coordinator Mike Kafka, who spent the last few seasons with Kansas City, where Travis Kelce was his tight end inspiration. “Daniel has done a great job with all of the positions we put him at: in-line, spread out, in the backfield like the play you saw there last week. He’s got flexibility and he’s an athletic kid and he’s smart and he’s dependable and he’s a guy that we trust in those situations.”

The Giants have only three players who have scored multiple touchdowns this season. Barkley has three, Jones has two, Bellinger has two.

And there may be more to come.

“Absolutely,” Brian Daboll said when asked if Bellinger can provide even more production and frill to the offense. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”

So how did the Giants project all of this from Bellinger’s rather mundane college career?

The Giants have been trying to find a reliable tight end for a long time. In the decade and a half since their last true hit in that area, Kevin Boss as a fifth-rounder in 2007, they have selected four of them without finding the right one, including first-round pick Evan Engram. Any number of free agents have come through the doors, from Kyle Rudolph and Martellus Bennett to Larry Donnell and Levine Toilolo. They’ve all left through those same doors without having made much of an impact.

The position itself has changed dramatically since the last time the Giants had a real weapon in that spot.

“It’s a traits-over-production position right now,” NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah said of tight ends. “You’re trying to find guys that have the ability to do those things. You don’t necessarily need to have seen them do it, but they need to have that ability . . . You get the traits and you can figure the rest of it out.”

Giants West Coast scout D.J. Boisture was on the trail for that kind of player when he first spotted Bellinger. The Giants then saw him in the Senior Bowl, where he was used a bit more like an NFL tight end than a college one, and went to work on finding what was missing from his highlight reels. That included meeting with assistant general manager Brandon Brown before the San Diego State pro day and conversations with director of player personnel Tim McDonnell. The Giants wanted to see if he fit the “smart, tough, dependable” mold they had in mind for all of their new acquisitions.

He did.

“[They] did a great job of scouting him coming out,” Daboll said. “They were huge proponents of him during the draft process and as we got to know him, what he stood for, some of the intangibles that we look for . . . They really stood on a table for him when they did their evaluations.”

So much so that the Giants not only selected him with the 112th overall pick in the fourth round in April but essentially plopped him in their starting lineup from the earliest OTAs onward.

“I think he’s come a long way,” Daboll said. “He’ll be the first to tell you he’s still got to keep on improving. But I’d say he’s a tough-minded individual. Tight end is a difficult position to go from college to the NFL. We ask him to do quite a bit. I’ve been very happy with how he’s approached things.”

Said Kafka: “I think you’re seeing that week in and week out as his role continues to expand and he continues to do different things within the offense. He’s done a great job with that . . . Daniel is putting in all the work. I’m really happy for him.”

So the Giants were able to envision Bellinger in this multi-faceted role.

Was Bellinger?

“I wouldn’t say I’m surprised,” he said with a lilt to indicate that yeah, maybe he is but just doesn’t like that word. “I would say that I am glad the coaches show that trust in me, and I need to keep working so I can keep having the coaches put more of their trust in me.”

The Giants probably don’t see Bellinger developing into a superstar like Kelce or his mentor, George Kittle, who invited him to Tight End University with others at the position from around the league this offseason. He does have a ceiling. But if he can become a strong and steady player along the lines of Eagles tight end Dallas Goedert or Dalton Schultz of the Cowboys, they’ll be plenty happy.

As much excitement as his London touchdown generated, though, he’s not there yet. Not as a pass-catcher, not as a route-runner, not as a blocker.

“My family is happy,” he said of his most recent performance. “They see that touchdown and they’re like, ‘Great game!’ But there are so many other parts of the game I need to get better at. Me personally, I just flush it. I take the good things about the play, learn from it and find the bad things about other plays and go from there.”

When it comes to being satisfied and soaking up adulation, he’s having none of it. He waves it off and goes back to work. Just as the Giants’ scouts and executives thought he would when they got to know him before the draft.

Maybe that’s the real “Bellinger pass,” him skipping the glory to return to the grind.

It might not be a terrible name after all.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.