Golden restoring little bit of shine to tarnished pass rush
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — When Markus Golden scooped the football off the turf at Gillette Stadium on Thursday night and looked up to see 42 yards between himself and the end zone, he knew he could make it.
“I was a running back in high school, and I scored a pretty good touchdown in college too,” the Giants linebacker said. “I’m used to carrying the ball a little bit … You have NFL receivers chasing you, so I knew they were going to have a shot to catch up with me and make a play on me.
“So I was thinking in my head when they came: ‘Make sure I don’t go down easy.’ It worked out for me.”
Golden made it for the touchdown, spinning and lunging the last few feet as he stretched the ball across the goal line. He had confidence … because he’d done it before.
It’s the same way with this entire season for the free-agent acquisition, who joined the Giants on a one-year contract.
Sure, it had been a while since Golden was able to put up big numbers in his sack production. He had 12 1⁄ in 2016 but only 2 1⁄ in
2 2 the two seasons after that. Injuries and schematic changes with his former team, the Cardinals, led to the diminished numbers.
He came to the Giants, a team in desperate need of a pass rusher, certain that he would be able to match those numbers and return to the type of player he was.
Golden had confidence … because he’d done it before.
“I’m all about working, so I worked hard this offseason,” Golden said. “When you put in the work that I was making sure I put in every day and making sure I was taking care of my body even better than I was before the injury, yes, I was confident in myself no matter what …
“Just putting in the work every day and keeping the confidence that everything would be how I wanted it to be.”
Through six games, it’s pretty close.
Golden leads the team with five sacks, all of them in the last five games. He has had at least a half-sack in each of those contests, matching the longest such streak of his career. He’s become the answer to the question that haunted the Giants all offseason and preseason (“where will the pass pressure come from?”) and is turning out to be, dollar for down, the best free-agent signing made by Dave Gettleman since he took over as general manager almost two years ago.
“I knew going into it that Markus Golden had that ability,” Pat Shurmur said on Friday. “It was a matter of record that he had been very disruptive the year before his injury, and he’s back and playing really hard.”
His five sacks are tied for sixth in the NFL heading into Sunday’s games, and he is helping the Giants regain a defensive identity that includes a pass rush. They haven’t had a player reach doubledigits in that category since Jason Pierre-Paul had 12 1⁄ in 2014 and have
2 finished among the bottom four teams in that category in three of the past four seasons.
Golden is on pace for 13 sacks and the Giants are on pace for 42, which would be their most since they had 47 in 2014.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Jakobi Meyers was expecting the throw to come over the top. As he tracked it through the air, though, it began to die in the wind. Tom Brady’s 23-yard pass ultimately arrived at his back shoulder, sending Meyers swiveling suddenly to catch it, shaking his defender in the process and diving to the ground at the Giants’ 2-yard line.
He squeezed the ball to his chest, every muscle in his body willing it to stay put and for this to be a good play.
“I drop this one,” he thought, “I might not get another one.”
He didn’t drop it. He got another and another after that and wound up catching all four of his targets Thursday for 54 yards in his best game as a Patriot. Soon, we’ll find out if that game was an outlier or if it was the start of something, an answer that likely depends on Brady’s trust in Meyers, the thing the rookie was so desperately trying to earn as he hugged the football tight on that second-quarter play.
Ask Brady and the coaches, they’ll tell you that’s a long process. Ask Meyers and many of those who know his game and they’ll tell you it’s one he’s suited for. And with the offense struggling and desperate for healthy receivers and two weeks left before the trading deadline, it might be a good time to see if that process can be sped up just a bit.
“Hopefully, we just proved to them that we can contribute more than just scout team or whatever the limited role is,” Meyers said, referring to himself and fellow rookie receiver Gunner Olszewski.
But let’s back up a bit. Meyers is the undrafted rookie out of North Carolina State who wowed during the preseason, mostly with quarterbacks not named Brady. His ball skills and route-running savvy won him a roster spot and surprised those who knew he was a lifelong quarterback who only converted to receiver three years ago.
Meyers has played in five of the six games, but he hadn’t been targeted much until Thursday. Counting the Giants game, he’s been targeted 10 times and has eight catches for 120 yards.
That’s all fairly promising, but what hasn’t been are Brady’s comments about working with young players.
“Those guys are trying,” Brady said last week of his rookie targets. “They’re young. I was young; I was trying once, too.”
Brady’s reasoning is that he doesn’t want to spend “mental energy on things that aren’t really my job,” such as coaching up young receivers.
Thing is, Meyers’s best traits are the ones Brady likes and the Patriots need.
“He can come off the ball really slow and then accelerate and get guys’ hips turned,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said in a telephone interview. “He’s really good at that. There’s just some basketball players who know how to shake a guy, and that’s how he is as a receiver, he’s very sudden.”
If Meyers can do that consistently at the NFL level, he’s valuable. They need receivers who can separate against one-onone coverage and, though Meyers isn’t physically dominating (his 4.63 40yard dash time from the Combine is probably what stood between him and getting drafted), it’s the precise route runners who are always in the right spot that Brady tends to prefer anyway.
Usually, that preference takes time to reveal itself. The last time Brady had a strong connection with a rookie receiver was in 2016, when fourth-round pick Malcolm Mitchell caught 32 of 48 passes for 401 yards and four touchdowns in 14 games. The time before that was in 2013, when Brady was forced by necessity to focus on rookies Aaron Dobson (519 yards, 4 touchdowns), Kenbrell Thompkins (466 yards, 4 touchdowns), and Josh Boyce (121 yards).
Mitchell, of course, was part of a Super Bowl team in 2016, while the 2013 offense isn’t exactly the most coveted of the past decade though it included more rookies in significant roles.
Like Brady, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels said it just takes time.
“There’s no shortcut for repetitions, experience, practice time,” McDaniels said. “That’s how you create trust and confidence in one another. You can’t just go into a meeting and tell people to be confident. You have to do it on the practice field.”