The Giants are heading into Week 1 with a major piece of their defense sitting at the center of the conversation, even if it isn’t getting much attention. At 32, DJ Reader is the player New York is counting on to clean up the biggest issue from last season: a run defense that got pushed around too easily.
ESPN’s Ben Solak pegged Reader as the Giants’ biggest X factor for the upcoming season, and the reasoning is simple. New York needs him to anchor the interior of the defensive line and bring stability to a group that was one of the league’s weakest against the run.
Solak said, "How many snaps does Reader have in him at his age, and can he achieve more impact against the run in a new defensive system in New York? Without a renaissance Reader season, I'm worried that we'll see another season in which the Giants' defense is too easy to run on for its pass rush to really matter."
That concern starts with what happened a year ago. The Giants gave up the second-most rushing yards per game in the NFL at 145.3. They also allowed the highest EPA per rush attempt by a wide margin and finished with one of the league’s worst early-down success rates.
That early-down weakness undercut the value of a pass rush that can be dangerous when it’s actually allowed to get after the quarterback.
Now the Giants are asking Reader to help change that. The move is a little striking: New York traded away Dexter Lawrence II and turned to a 32-year-old who is coming off one of the roughest seasons of his career.
The front office did add help at linebacker with Tremaine Edmunds and Arvell Reese, and those moves should matter. But the foundation of the run defense still comes back to Reader holding his ground on the inside.
His reputation has been built on stopping the run, but the last two seasons haven’t looked like his best work. Reader has logged the two lowest PFF run defense grades of his career and has recorded just 27 run stops over that stretch.
Even so, he remained available in May, which says plenty about where he stands entering this season.
The Giants are betting he can get back to something close to his peak. If he does, the run defense has a chance to be good enough to give Abdul Carter and Brian Burns more opportunities to change games. If he doesn’t, New York could be staring at the same kind of run defense problems it had in 2025.
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Greg Newsome II has leaned into that challenge, too, saying the intensity of camp has matched the size of the task ahead. For the Giants, the Cowboys are more than just an opponent on the schedule - they are the measuring stick for whether this new camp approach can translate once the season begins. [Read more 🡒]