New York Giants 2026 Coverage Report: Seven Playoff Picks, Zero Hits

One post per club, working through how the outlets MissedTakes tracks handled each team and how those calls have graded out. This is the New York Giants. Everything below is drawn from our own database of tracked sources — it measures the outlets and shows we log, not all of football media.

The coverage baseline: middle of the pack

Across all 32 clubs, the New York Giants account for 633 logged takes, of which 199 have been graded. That is 15th in raw volume and 18th in graded volume. The Buffalo Bills lead the league with 1,026 takes; the Kansas City Chiefs lead with 389 graded. At the bottom, the Carolina Panthers have 120 graded takes and the Atlanta Falcons 341 total.

So: not a blind spot, not a spotlight. The Giants get covered like a middling-interest team, which is roughly what their recent results have earned. The club went 4-13 in 2025 and 3-14 in 2024, and its last playoff appearance in our season file is 2022 (9-7-1). Two top-10 picks in the 2026 draft — Ohio State linebacker Arvell Reese at No. 5 and Miami tackle Francis Mauigoa at No. 10 — are the main reason the pre-draft volume is as high as it is.

Average accuracy on graded Giants takes is 66.0, with an average skill delta of +5.75 — accuracy in line with the Bears and Titans, skill barely above a naive baseline. The distribution underneath that average is where the story is.

The cutdown: 96 calls, two grades

The series' news hook is the 53-man cutdown, and here the honest answer is that the file is not ready. There are 96 roster-spot calls on the Giants in the database. Two of them are graded. Both belong to LaVar Arrington, from an April 2025 segment in which he said the Giants would keep both Brian Burns and Kayvon Thibodeaux: "so i don't think They get Rid. OF burns or thibodeaux i. Think they keep going." Both graded 100 for accuracy — and 0 for skill, because the naive baseline ("he was on somebody's 53 last season") said the same thing. Burns spent 17 of 18 weeks on the 53, Thibodeaux 14.

The other 94 are still pending, and nearly all of them come from the last two weeks of August 2026. Patricia Traina supplies the bulk of them: a full position-by-position 53-man projection on August 29 that keeps Evan Neal ("I could see the Giants initially keeping Evan Neal, who was fantastic as a run blocker, and then seeing if they can trade him once the dust settles") and cuts Thomas Fidone II ("the numbers don't appear to favor his chances of making the roster"), plus a Week 1 inactive-list projection published September 5.

The rest of the pending pile clusters on two names. Darius Slayton draws release calls from Paul Schwartz — "financial considerations are not going to save Slayton" — and from Evan Tarracciano, while Traina has him as a "prospective roster lock" alongside Malik Nabers and Malachi Fields. Odell Beckham Jr. draws the opposite split: Carter Bahns has him on the cut-risk list ("still an uphill battle for the three-time Pro Bowler to stay on the right side of the cut line"), Charean Williams argues an injury elsewhere improved his odds, and Nathan Jahnke has him as the X receiver in a six-man room that makes it.

Those are real disagreements with real names attached, and none of them has a grade yet. We will not pretend otherwise. Check back when the roster-spot file settles.

What the graded record actually shows

Sixteen prediction types carry at least one graded Giants take. The volume is concentrated in two of them.

Mock drafts are the strong suit. 93 graded calls, 77.4 average accuracy, +35.3 average skill — comfortably the best-supported thing our tracked sources did with this team. Dane Brugler put Abdul Carter third to the Giants in April 2025 and scored a clean 100. Ross Jackson had Arvell Reese going fifth to New York on February 23, 2026 — exactly right, 100 accuracy, +42.73 skill. Daniel Jeremiah and Rich Eisen both landed Carnell Tate at No. 5 for 95.76 when he went fourth.

Everything about the actual 2025 season went the other way. Playoff picks: seven graded, average accuracy 0.0, average skill −179.43. Every tracked source who put the Giants in the field was wrong. Jamie Erdahl did it twice ("I am most proud of me sticking to my New York Giants gut feeling," scored 0 at −200 skill). Nick Wright backed them at +500 three separate times. Colin Cowherd predicted in January 2026 that "Harbaugh's going to crush it with the Giants. They're going to be a playoff team next year" — 0 accuracy, −100 skill — and separately had them winning the NFC East, also 0.

Award picks: six graded, average accuracy 0.0. Five of the six were Abdul Carter for Defensive Rookie of the Year, from Manti Te'o, Jourdan Rodrigue and others; Carson Schwesinger won it. Kyle Brandt's Cam Skattebo offensive-rookie pick was the sixth.

Game-outcome picks: 15 graded, 20.0 accuracy, −109.27 skill. Season win totals were the least embarrassing of the season-level calls at 57.1 accuracy on 14 grades. The 2025 win-total field — 13 calls — averaged 6.1 wins against an actual four, ranging from Cowherd at three to a Rich Eisen Show number of ten. John Middlekauff called it exactly: "Colling Thiss got four or five wins written all over it," graded 100 with +70 skill.

One more misread worth naming: fantasy calls on Malik Nabers. LaQuan Jones had him "cracking that top three of the Fantasy wide receivers"; he finished WR97. Andrew Erickson's January 2026 buy-low argument on the same player also graded 0, at −100 skill.

Who has a Giants record

Fifteen pundits have at least five graded Giants takes. Nobody has more than 11, which is thin enough that none of this should be read as a beat-level track record.

Marcus Mosher tops the accuracy column on six graded takes, most of them fantasy breakout calls that landed — Wan'Dale Robinson and Drew Lock both hit at +200 skill. Daniel Jeremiah has the best combination of sample and score: 82.6 accuracy and +43.40 skill on nine, essentially all draft work. At the other end, the show-level Rich Eisen Show record on the Giants (11 graded, 26.5, −119.80) is a reminder of what happens when a program spends its Giants airtime on season outcomes rather than the draft.

The pattern is consistent across the file: on where the Giants would pick and who they would take, our tracked sources were good. On whether the Giants would be any good, they were not. Read the scoring methodology for how skill deltas are computed, and the leaderboard for how these names rate league-wide.