Giants hope to keep Dexter Lawrence, Leonard Williams together on field
New York Giants defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence II, right, high fives defensive lineman Leonard Williams during training camp last year. Credit: Brad Penner
For Dexter Lawrence and Leonard Williams, their communication on the football field is often unspoken.
They know each other so well.
They know what to expect from each other.
There’s trust.
Still, their position coach wants more.
“They worked hard to master the techniques and the fundamentals we were teaching them,” Giants defensive line coach Andre Patterson said during minicamp last week. “But I’m greedy.”
Patterson wants more, as Williams enters his ninth season and Lawrence his fifth.
“They’re like twins,” said Patterson, who has four decades of coaching experience and counts the great John Randle, a Hall of Famer, among his pupils. “They can finish each other’s sentences, play off one another [on the field]. That’s why it’s great when they’re on the field together.”
That’s the goal in 2023.
Last season, Williams dealt with a cervical neck issue and missed five games while Lawrence had his best season and cashed in with a four-year, $90 million contract.
This season, Williams is playing on an expiring contract. He says he is “open to staying” with the Giants. He also has the third-highest cap hit in the NFL, behind Patrick Mahomes and Ryan Tannehill.
“I think I have a good camaraderie with my teammates. I would love to keep playing with Dex,” Williams said. “I would love to keep playing with these coaches that I’ve gotten to know. I’m also not one of those players that wants to bounce around team to team. I want to be able to be here.”
The future is now for Williams and Lawrence. They received help this offseason, with the signings of defensive tackles A’Shawn Robinson and Rakeem Nunez-Roches, who prefers to be called Nacho. Both Robinson and Nunez-Roches bring resumes as run-stoppers with them. The Giants ranked 27th in the league last season against the run.
Both Lawrence and Williams know the defense will go as they do.
“We’re top tier,” Lawrence said. “We've been playing together four, going on five years now. Sometimes we look at each other and know what’s about to happen and know what we want to do in that play. So, I think, you know, we both stayed healthy and grow through this time off and come back in the best shape of our lives and do something special.”
Drills meant to improve the run defense were a significant part of the defense’s spring agenda.
“I think we have been working a lot on fits so far, which is the one thing we can work on when we're not in pads,” Williams said. “I think [we need to] just make sure that we’re trusting the guy next to us, make sure we’re staying in the gap that we’re responsible for, trusting that the guy in front of us, next to us, behind us, is going to fit his gap as well.”
It may also help if Lawrence and Williams can get off the field at times. Especially Lawrence, who played an outrageous (for a man his size) 82% of the defensive snaps in 2022 (864 snaps) after never topping 69% of defensive snaps played in his first three seasons, according to the Giants.
Asked if playing “slightly fewer” snaps might help both players, Williams said: “I mean, that's been the history of football. D-linemen are usually not taking 100% or 90% of snaps. It’s better to have a rotation and keep guys fresh. It's going to be fun that way when we're rotating guys, just beating up on offensive lines together. It's going to be fun.”
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
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