New York Giants’ Draft Class of 2024 Makes the Grade

When New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll begin to look back on the dreadful season the organization had in the third year under their respective helms, they’ll be hard-pressed to find much good to carry over into the following campaign in 2025. 

However, with the two men having their respective jobs spared by Giants ownership, who expressed a continued belief in their regime’s plan for the future after a historic 3-14 finish, it can’t be discounted how much the early success of the 2024 draft class played a part in that tough decision. 

Compared to the previous draft class, which had some shaky starts to their first couple of years in East Rutherford, Schoen’s latest core has been a rare positive for the Giants’ miserable season. A few players in that circle immediately jumped into starting roles and became some of the highest contributors throughout the roster. 

Of the six players the Giants selected, they all finished in the top eight names on the offensive and defensive team leaderboards. Two players—wide receiver Malik Nabers and running back Tyrone Tracy Jr.—were leaders in their respective positions and combined to notch long-held rookie records at both the franchise and NFL level.

The Giants will still be in search of that next quarterback of the future and extra reinforcements to fortify other positions via free agency and the draft, but in the words of Schoen, the organization is “happy with the core foundation” and believe they will be key pieces alongside the key veterans moving forward.

Until then, let’s look back at the individual stories from each of the six Giants 2024 rookie class members and assign a grade based on what they brought to the season.

New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers was by far the most accomplished rookie in the 2024 draft class, and that’s not even close to a question.

After failing to move up the board to select a premier quarterback prospect last April, the Giants decided their Plan B was to grab one of the top pass catchers to partner with Daniel Jones and provide him a No. 1 option for the first time in his career. 

Nabers was the most impressive candidate available at No. 6 overall, and his campaign certainly panned out that way. He exploded to a record debut.

Despite playing with four different quarterbacks throughout the season, Nabers led the Giants’ receiving department with a massive haul of 109 receptions on 170 targets for 1,204 yards, seven touchdowns, and an average of 11.0 yards per catch.

With those introductory statistics, Nabers became the new Giants record holder for the most receptions made in a rookie campaign, which was previously held by Steve Smith at 107 catches. He set the record in the final game of the season against the Philadelphia Eagles. 

Nabers also partnered his efforts with fellow rookie and running back Tyrone Tracy Jr. to become the third NFL rookie duo ever to eclipse 1,000 yards from scrimmage, joining the last players who accomplished it, Marques Colston and Reggie Bush, for the New Orleans Saints in the 2006 season. 

While the poor quality quarterback play affected other players, Nabers was the exception to the rule. Short of missing two games in the early part of the season due to a concussion, Nabers maintained the most consistent production in the Giants offensive huddle by securing at least five receptions in all but one contest with his single-game of 12 in Week 4. 

What’s more, he impacted the offense from all different levels of the field. He was a menace in the short game, hauling in quick grabs that moved the sticks and compounded to help big his run to the rookie reception crown. 

The damage came in bunches after the contact, as well. Nabers finished 11th among receivers in yards after the catch, and 17.6 percent of his target share came in passes of 20 yards or more. 

Nabers was as close to the perfect prospect the Giants could have made in the 2024 draft after the quarterback was out of the picture. 

The only things he needs to focus on are maintaining his body and correcting his issues with dropping the football, as he finished with nine total drops, ranking third-highest in the position.

Before a season-ending ankle injury derailed his rookie season and took him off the field, safety Tyler Nubin looked like an early candidate for the franchise’s next “Ironman” producer. 

While he only appeared in 13 games this season, Nubin was almost always the biggest contributor on the defensive side of the football. If it hadn’t been for inside linebacker Micah McFadden’s run on tackles in the fourth quarter of the season, Nubin would have remained the Giants’ lead man in terms of stops, where he instead finished second with 98 tackles (57 solo).

Along with his tackles, Nubin added four tackles for loss, one forced fumble with recovery, and one pass deflection. He also tallied eight or more tackles in seven of his 13 starts, including a three-game run with 12 total tackles from Weeks 10 through 13. 

Nubin was drafted in the second round to become the heir apparent to the position after Xavier McKinney left the Giants and signed with the Green Bay Packers in free agency. 

The franchise loved the prospect for his aggressive play in both man and zone coverages and his ability to be a very clean tackler, for which he was one of Minnesota’s best in college football. 

In his 440 overall coverage snaps, Nubin played a little looser in zone coverage than he did against man, which was a product of having extra support from his fellow cornerbacks in defensive coordinator Shane Bowen’s quarters-heavy system. 

Despite allowing an 85.7 percent reception rate, which was third among rookie safeties, Nubin was one of the best players at limiting damage and making opponents play more of a short-to-midrange game instead of burning the unit with one-on-one matchups. 

He finished his debut with just 48 yards allowed after the catch and whiffed on just 5.7 percent of his tackles while playing in zone coverage. 

If you transferred his numbers over to man coverage looks, where he excels as a player who loves to attack the ball and lit up the intended target, Nubin’s numbers improved to just six catches allowed for 49 yards and 26 after contact, which was one of the best in the league. 

That is exactly why Nubin’s talents translated extremely well in stopping the run. The Giants had a good niche for using Nubin as an underneath defender and sending him into the trenches to rough up the opposing ball carrier. 

He finished the year as the second-best graded safety among rookies, according to PFF, and made 32 of his 98 tackles near the line of scrimmage. 

Nubin was also becoming a quick leader in the Giants’ defensive huddle and locker room, another element they lost when McKinney walked out the door. From what they’ve seen, he has the potential to become a mainstay in the unit if he remains healthy when he returns. 

With a full offseason still to come, Nubin should help bolster the secondary to be tougher to move the football against in 2025.

If one had to pick the biggest steal of the Giants’ 2024 draft class, it’s a fair argument to say that slot cornerback Dru Phillips is the player who fits the bill amid his surprise breakout campaign. 

Selected in the third round out of Kentucky, Phillips’ welcome to the NFL was one that also dealt with some injury woes that cut short his full potential. However, in just 14 games played this season, the 23-year-old evolved into one of the better starting slot defenders in the league that the Giants have witnessed in a long time. 

Phillips finished his rookie debut as the sixth-most productive player on New York’s defensive leaderboard and first among rostered cornerbacks with 71 total tackles (46 solo), one sack, one interception, two forced fumbles, one pass deflection, and seven tackles for loss. 

He got off to a hot start with over 20 tackles in the first month of the season and was almost silencing some of the best slot receivers to grace the sport. 

His first few tests featured talented veterans such as Jordan Addison and Tyler Lockett, but Phillips was never scared to take on any of them as a novice and would pass each matchup with flying colors. 

The fresh face held all those receivers to just eight catches overall for 37 yards and 38 yards after contact, which helped the Giants snag two big wins off the strong outings from their defense. 

As he went through the rest of the journey, Phillips appeared in at least 36 snaps per game, totaling 335 in coverage, created 31 more stops, allowed just one touchdown, and kept his missed tackles rate below 14 percent, including posting a clean game in seven of his starts. 

Given his friendly acclimation into Shane Bowen’s cornerback-friendly system and his sharp ball skills, Phillips became one of the Giants’ best assets in zone coverage. 

He allowed a 92.9 percent reception rate that was second in the position but ended up with the same ranked coverage grade of 84.3 as he produced 14 of his total stops and averaged a -0.2 average distance of target in those zone looks. 

What that translates to is that Phillips did a fantastic job limiting the depth of his opponents’ aerial offense and forced pass catchers back toward the line of scrimmage to secure the play as pressure was caving down on the backfield. 

The Giants’ pass rush certainly helped his case, but partnering with a talent for redirecting routes and wrapping up at the point of contact made Phillips’ metrics impressive. 

Phillips didn’t enjoy the same luck in man packages due to his size and lack of experience competing in press situations. He sometimes could get beat over the top by speedy receiving threats, which he’ll need to work on with his bulking and additional reps in the offseason. 

That said, the fact that a third-round cornerback prospect was producing numbers at the level of a premier first-round talent shows that Joe Schoen hit the jackpot with Phillips joining the development of a young secondary. If he stays healthy and the unit can gel more cohesively on the perimeter, they’ll become a tougher group to burn in any scenario.

New York Giants tight end Theo Johnson might have been the most “disappointing” of the six members of the franchise’s latest rookie corps, though not entirely Johnson’s fault, as we’ll explain momentarily. 

While the Darren Waller experiment in the Big Apple was never anything to write home about, the intention was for the veteran to serve as a dynamic receiving threat in the Giants’ offense. So that expectation was passed down to Johnson to carry that element into his NFL career after impressing at Penn State. 

Despite his feats in FBS play, which included a near 1,000-yard campaign with 12 touchdowns in his last year at Penn State, they didn’t come close to translating into his first run at the professional level. 

Johnson finished fourth on a mediocre Giants receiving unit with 29 receptions on 43 targets for 331 yards, an average of 11.4 yards per catch, and one touchdown in Week 9 against Washington. 

To be fair, it took a while for Johnson even to become a desired target in the team’s passing attack, as the Giants threw a lot at him early and often. His first few games of the season were limited to mostly blocking work as the sixth in-line guy for heavy personnel packages, and he only touched the pigskin three times for a dismal 39 yards. 

It would take until Week 5 against Seattle, a 29-20 win for New York, for the rookie tight end to give a little taste of what he can do in the Giants offense if you can get him the ball in space. He had one of his two games with five catches for 48 yards and a long ball of 22 yards to enter into the fold more as the season progressed.

Still, Johnson’s impact was quite thin for most of the seven games he played before losing his debut year to a foot injury. He only recorded over 50 yards receiving in two more games and was often missed on potential over-the-top throws that the quarterback couldn’t deliver cleanly to connect with him. 

Again, that isn’t all his fault, but for a Giants offense that wanted him to come and be involved in the game plan at a time when the reliance on tight ends is waning, both sides simply didn’t do enough to impact those affairs significantly. 

If anything, the Giants discovered Johnson’s talents as an intermediate target who can grab difficult throws with his 6-foot-4 and 264-pound size advantage that made him stand out in college. 

He can run good routes to the corners or across the middle, but it will require better timing and field vision from the quarterback position to rescue the expectations this fourth-round selection made for himself.

Staying on the field would also help, as after playing in 12 contests, he suffered a season-ending foot injury. But despite all the ups and downs of his rookie season, the Giants have themselves a keeper in Johnson.

The New York Giants’ fifth-round selection of Tyrone Tracy Jr. might not have replaced the 2,000+ yard rushing frenzy their former ball carrier Saquon Barkley put up after leaving for Philadelphia. 

However, the young back has still refreshed the Giants’ ground attack and presented them with a new hopeful addition for the long-term future. 

Tracy’s arrival to the NFL came on slowly as he spent the first few weeks of the season earning sparse reps behind the veteran Devin Singletary, who the Giants signed in free agency. 

When an injury kept Singletary off the field in Week against Seattle, his rookie teammate stepped up to the plate and never went backward for the rest of the season. 

In the team’s 29-20 win over the Seahawks, Tracy erupted for 18 carries, a feat he achieved twice in 2024, for 129 yards to help power the Giants in the trenches in one of their few victories in a tough road environment. 

That performance thrust him into the starting role, where he would become one of the Giants’ biggest offensive weapons besides wide receiver Malik Nabers and form that dynamic duo that chased rookie history. 

He would add two more 100+ yard games to his resume in Weeks 8 and 10, paving the way to a stat line of 192 carries for 839 yards (4.4 average) and five touchdowns, which led the team in the rushing department. 

Tracy also added another 38 catches for 284 yards and one touchdown using his old college background as a wide receiver, giving the Giants a dual-threat weapon they once had with Barkley that could resurrect itself as Tracy continues to earn more reps next season. 

For a fifth-round flier out of Purdue, Tracy was making the highlight plays and impactful contributions with some of the best running backs in the entire league. He ranked top-25 in attempts and yards and was just outside that mark in several categories that were even better among his first-year peers. 

In the 2024 class it was really just a race between Tracy and the Buccaneers’ Bucky Irving for rushing prominence and Tracy followed slightly behind him in areas such as touchdowns, yards after contact, in which Tracy was a menace with 546 yards, missed tackles forced (34) and runs of 10+ yards. 

Tracy would rack up the second metric by tallying at least 40 yards after contact in six of his 17 games played this season, the most being 77 yards he earned in Week 10 against Carolina to nearly bring the Giants to the cusp of a win in Munich. 

The bad news is that the game would also feature his first big lesson in adversity in the NFL. He fumbled the opening snap of overtime to hand New York a grueling 20-17 loss to the Panthers on an ensuing kick. 

That is one area Tracy needs to sharpen as he works on his craft in the offseason. There is little reason to doubt his character or that he won’t come back to MetLife Stadium improved in his sophomore season. 

All the big stats added up for a remarkable rookie campaign that should leave Giants fans hopeful that they have a promising replacement for Barkley who can only get better with more time competing at the professional level. 

Tracy is a tough and gritty rusher who thrives at earning the extra yardage and can make flashy plays if he bursts through the gaps and get into space.

With two veterans in Bobby Okereke and Micah McFadden holding down the interior of the second level of the Giants’ defense, rookie inside linebacker Darius Muasau wasn’t supposed to be as influential a figure in the huddle as he would soon become in the latter half of the season. 

Before Week 14, the UCLA product was mostly a special teams guy who earned his keep in all four phases of that department for the Giants. 

His welcome to the NFL moment did come in the season opener against Minnesota when he recorded his first interception–the only one that the Giants had until cornerback Tre Hawkins III notched one against the Saints–and played in 45 snaps in the lackluster 28-6 loss. 

After that, Muasau only saw 14 defensive snaps or less in the next seven contests he was active for, most of which came in the run support for a Giants unit that was getting pounded on the ground almost every Sunday anyway and allowed 13 100-yard rushers in 2024. 

However, in the final stretch of the Giants’ 3-14 year, injuries were piling up all over the roster, and one of their victims was Okereke, who would miss the rest of the regular season with a back ailment. 

Okereke’s absence meant Muasau was next in line to earn some valuable reps, and he wound up taking advantage of it to finish as one of the team’s top-10 defensive producers. 

Muasau finished eighth on the defensive leaderboard with 55 total tackles (26 solo), three tackles for loss, one interception, and one pass deflectio,n which was also good for third in the linebacker position behind Okereke and edge man Brian Burns. 

Most of that production came in the last five games of the season, where he made at least eight tackles in four of them and had a season-high 11 in Week 16’s loss to the Atlanta Falcons. 

As mentioned, Muasau made the most of his opportunity to build some tape for next year despite playing meaningless games for New York. He played in at least 52 snaps in the same stretch and was a very solid tackler who helped the Giants improve their opposing rushing statistics towards the end, posting only four missed tackles in his extensive workload. 

In the passing realm, he was always exposed over the middle and allowed some extra yardage after contact, but he was stout toward the end zone and only allowed one score to be made in his vicinity. 

His best game was also in Week 16 against Atlanta when his coverage made it impossible to gain anything on him, and he was not targeted once during the entire game. 

For rookie class comparisons, Muasau finished with the seventh-best run defense grade of 68.1 among rookie linebackers and was tied in a few categories. He has some work to do in the coverage realm, and with a more filling season of reps under his belt in 2025, a more telling judgment of his long-term value can be made at this same time. 

Muasau at least made the most of his situation and gave the Giants some valiant protection even with the season all but finished early. That is commendable for a rookie of his status that wasn’t supposed to be an immediate contributor to the starting defense this past season.