Giants run same play eight times to fuel game-winning drive
Saquon Barkley of the New York Giants is tackled in the fourth quarter against the Jacksonville Jaguars at TIAA Bank Field on October 23, 2022 in Jacksonville, Florida. Credit: Getty Images/Mike Carlson
At some point, Daniel Jones might have thought there was a glitch in the radio receiver in his helmet. Maybe offensive coordinator Mike Kafka’s voice was skipping or on some kind of loop. The same words kept coming onto the field over and over again.
It wasn’t a flaw, though. Rather, it was about as close to perfection as the Giants have reached this season.
On the drive in which they went 61 yards, ate up about 3 1⁄2 minutes of the waning clock and kicked a field goal that gave them a six-point lead, the Giants ran the same play eight times. Eight times!
There were some variations and wrinkles to it, three different players carried the ball, and the results were somewhat mixed, but the basic tenet was the same. The Giants had an extra lineman on the field, pulled a guard, and ran power behind him into the very soul of a bewildered and wilting Jaguars defense.
So many times Kafka and coach Brian Daboll are credited for their creativity. In this case, it was their lack of it that won the game for the Giants, assuming one considers such repetition unimaginative.
“It’s not hard to call it if it’s working,” Daboll said Monday. “It’s probably a little bit harder to block it sometimes. But there’s times where they are thinking ‘they can’t run this again,’ and then you run it again . . . Kafka stayed with it.”
That drive started at the Giants’ 23 after a Jaguars punt with 4:29 remaining. Saquon Barkley took a handoff right for 13 yards. Then another handoff right for 7. Then for 20.
“Can’t stop it, why not?” Barkley said after the game.
Backup running back Matt Breida came in and ran the same play, only this time to the left, for a gain of 2. Then Jones faked a handoff to Barkley going right but kept the ball himself and ran left, sliding inbounds after a gain of 15 to bring the game to the two-minute warning.
The Giants ran it three more times to reach the Jaguars’ 20 before kicking the field goal.
“If it’s not broke, you don’t even have to fix it,” Breida said. “I guess that play was working that whole drive, and we decided to keep running with it. And it got us the results that we wanted.”
Well, almost. Had Barkley not fallen out of bounds with 1:07 remaining, the Giants could have run the clock all the way down to about 20 seconds remaining when they kicked it off. That would have avoided the fiasco of the final minute that almost cost them the game.
Nevertheless, the drive itself was a thing of redundant beauty. “I think it demoralizes a team when they know you’re going to run the ball and it’s going to be the same play over and over and they can’t stop it,” Breida said. “It’s a great feeling [for the offense].”
That it happened on the backs of two backup offensive linemen in key roles made it all the more impressive. Left guard Ben Bredeson and right tackle Evan Neal left the game in the first half with knee injuries. Daboll said they are considered week-to-week after MRIs on Monday showed no season-ending injuries.
In their place were rookie guard Joshua Ezeudu and tackle Tyre Phillips. It was Ezeudu who kept pulling to the right and Phillips who kept down-blocking to create the holes through which Barkley passed.
Barkley had only 66 rushing yards on 18 carries before that drive. He had 44 yards on six carries during it.
“I think they both did a good job,” Daboll said of the backup linemen. “They were prepared and that’s a credit to them, first and foremost, but then Bobby [Johnson, the offensive line coach] and Tony [Sparano Jr., the assistant offensive line coach] spend a lot of extra time with some of those younger guys or guys that are working on the practice squad. They were both ready to go and prepared and did a good job.”
It’s also not far-fetched to believe that if tight end Daniel Bellinger hadn’t left the game early with an eye injury, the Giants might not have deployed offensive lineman Devrey Hamilton as they did throughout that drive (not to mention Jack Anderson, who came in when the Giants ran the play from a seven-linemen set).
It was another example of the Giants’ alchemy that has been able to turn stones into gold this season. Just as they stumbled upon direct snaps to Barkley being effective only after Jones’ ankle injury and Tyrod Taylor’s concussion forced them to put the running back at quarterback, the three injuries early in this game begat the personnel who made the eight-play jackhammering of the Jaguars possible.
“Was it demoralizing? I don’t know,” Barkley said. “Just I can tell when you lean on defense, when you lean on defense throughout the game, you can feel them starting to soften up.”
The Giants found something Jacksonville could not stop. Credit to them for not stopping it either.
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.
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