Evan Neal is back with the Giants, but the leash is shorter than ever.
New York brought him back in March on a one-year veteran-minimum deal worth $1.215 million, and there’s no guaranteed money attached. That’s a far cry from the kind of investment that comes with being the seventh pick in the draft four years ago. It also says plenty about where the Giants see this going: not as a sure thing, but as a cheap gamble.
The team already made its bigger decision in April 2025, declining Neal’s fifth-year option. That would have paid him $16.7 million in 2026. Instead, the Giants walked away, and then Neal lost the entire season to a hamstring injury.
He didn’t play a single offensive snap in 2025 after landing on injured reserve and never getting released. For a player who badly needed a healthy year to rebuild his value, it was another brutal setback in a career that has never really gotten on track.
The numbers tell the story. Neal’s rookie season in 2022 brought 39 pressures and seven sacks allowed on 453 pass-block snaps, along with a 44.1 overall PFF grade.
Since then, injuries have eaten away at his availability. He played 13 games and started 13 in 2022, then 7 and 7 in 2023, then 9 and 7 in 2024, before the blank slate of 2025.
Across four seasons, he has 27 starts total.
Now the Giants are trying him somewhere new. Neal is moving to right guard, a position he has not played in a game since his freshman year at Alabama in 2019. The idea is simple enough: maybe tighter space and a shorter kick-slide can cover for the foot-speed issues that hurt him at tackle.
But this is not a move backed by confidence. It’s a low-cost test.
The competition around him is real, and it’s not built for sentiment. First-round rookie Francis Mauigoa is the favorite to start at right guard.
The Giants also brought in Daniel Faalele from Baltimore and still have developmental interior linemen Jake Kubas and Bryan Hudson in the mix. Neal is fighting for one of the last spots on the line, not a job the staff is planning around.
He also doesn’t bring special-teams value, which makes life even harder for a borderline roster player.
Still, Neal has the size and the draft pedigree that keep coaches interested. If he has a clean camp at guard, there’s at least a path to salvaging something here.
But the margin for error is basically gone. The Giants are paying him like a long shot because that’s what he is, and this summer may be the last chance for the former top-10 pick to show he’s not a mistake they’re ready to move on from.
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