Giants’ Andre Patterson: D-line doing ‘good job’ vs. the run for NFL-worst run defense

The Giants defense allows a league-worst 5.1 yards per carry, but defensive line coach Andre Patterson said Friday that his group has done well against the run.

“Oh, I think we’ve done a good job against the run,” Patterson said as the Giants (2-10) prepared to host the New Orleans Saints (4-8) on Sunday. “It’s like I tell people all the time: you grow up in little league and in high school, ‘oh, the run game is the front seven. It’s the D-line and the linebackers.’ The NFL game isn’t that way.”

“They’re making those guys on the perimeter tackle,” the D-line coach continued. “They’re gonna make your corner tackle. They’re gonna make your safeties tackle. They’re gonna find a way to make those guys have to come up and make tackles. So our problem is not that we’re getting blown off the ball. That’s not our issue. We’ve just got to be better at when we get our hands on the guy, getting him on the ground.”

The Giants defense is allowing the fourth-most yards before contact (669) in the NFL and the 10th most yards after contact, per NFL NextGenStats. No part of their run defense has been good enough: not up front and not on the back end.

They have allowed 17 runs of 20-plus yards and five runs of 40-plus yards, both worst in the league.

But Patterson said the primary problem with the Giants’ run defense is bad tackling.

“Well, I think the biggest thing is missed tackles,” he said. “We’ve done all kinds of studies on it. Our biggest thing is a guy will break through for a three-yard gain and we miss the tackle, it becomes 15. Or a guy pops through for a seven-yard gain and we miss the tackle and it becomes 40.”

“To me,” he said, “that’s the biggest issue that we have is that the missed tackles have popped up and gotten us at times in games that aren’t very good. Before the last game we went back and we did a study, and I think Shane [Bowen] told you guys it was 33 explosive plays in the run game that we had given up, OK? The correlation with that is on the 33 plays there were 38 missed tackles. So that’s the biggest thing.”

Patterson was alluding to a previous press conference of defensive coordinator Shane Bowen’s.

Bowen said in late November that “85 percent” of the run plays were played well and the handful of explosives were skewing the numbers and compromising the rest of their work.

Several explosive runs have led to missed tackles, though, because the running backs are exploding downhill untouched into the defense’s second level.

The Giants defense has allowed 25 runs of 10-plus yards inside the tackles and 26 such runs outside the tackles, an almost identical number, per the NFL’s official database.

They have allowed eight runs of 20-plus yards inside the tackles and seven such runs outside the tackles, an almost identical number, per the NFL.

Dexter Lawrence (elbow), who is now out for the season, does rank as Pro Football Focus’ second-best run defender out of 208 interior defensive line.

But Rakeem Nunez-Roches (110th), Elijah Chatman (129th), Armon Watts (163rd), Jordon Riley (182nd) and D.J. Davidson (194th) are all in the NFL’s bottom half.

Missed tackles is definitely an issue on the back end, too, of course. The Giants have the seventh-most (118) missed tackles among defenses who have played 12 games.

One would think they’d rank dead last in that category listening to Patterson, though.

Here’s the truth: no great run defense has ever had a D-line that wasn’t doing its job effectively, and no bad run defense has ever had a D-line that was.

Don’t believe that? Allow Saints running back Alvin Kamara to demonstrate on Sunday.