New York Giants Off-Season review: 2020 NFL Draft

A closer look at how the New York Giants’ NFL draft picks for 2020 should have gone

Welcome folks! This is the ongoing three-part series on the New York Giants’ off-season. After my first article in this series, a complete team assessment,  we’ve established that the team’s biggest needs are center,  linebacker and maybe quarterback.

Today I wanted to look at how they dealt (or didn’t) deal with those holes in the 2020 NFL Draft.

The NFL draft can be tricky. There are no sure-fire picks.  Even if all of the stats, college highlights, combine numbers, pro day workouts, and scouts say so.

Sometimes the college game these young men play just doesn’t transfer over to the big time. Then again, sometimes draft picks overachieve and become hall of famers. However, we have no choice but to roll the dice and use all of the tools mentioned above to pick what a team would hope to be a beneficial NFL player.

Thanks to their 4-12 season, the Giants earned themselves yet another top pick in this year’s draft. They had one pick in the first round, which was the fourth overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft.

Should they have drafted straight up, or should they have tried to make some moves to get more draft collateral? Including keeping it at just picking fourth overall, I have come up with four possible routes that the Giants could’ve taken this year.

I will not only show you what my ideas were for possible trades, but also who I feel they should’ve taken, and which routes I would have preferred.

They ended up taking Andrew Thomas, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound offensive tackle, out of Georgia, who had a 6.49 draft grading (predicted first or second year starter) by NFL.com. This isn’t the way I would have drafted, but he is a solid draft pick. Definitely fills a hole on the Giants O-line at the tackle position. I would’ve drafted differently and taken care of this position in free agency.

The resources I will be using are as follows:

• The draft prospects rating system from- NFL.com/draft prospects. This will be put in parenthesis next to each draft pick. It will read “PR=__”, PR will stand for Prospect Rating. The system goes from a 5.0 to a perfect score of 8.0. For reference the highest-rated draft pick in this year’s draft class was Chase Young with a rating of 7.37.
• The draft trade value chart- DraftTek NFL draft trade value chart. This will be put in parenthesis next to the draft pick position number. It will read “PV=__”, PV will stand for Pick Value. The values of draft pick positions are rated from 3,000 to 1. The point value of 3,000 is reserved for the No. 1 pick in the draft.