As long as he’s under center, the Giants will be Eli Manning’s team.
He’s the two-time Super Bowl MVP and arguably the best quarterback in this storied franchise’s history. However over the past two seasons, the Giants biggest star has been easily Manning’s favorite target, Odell Beckham, Jr.
And frankly, he’s also good at math. During his first two seasons, the Giants won six games apiece and this was his response: “That’s 12 wins total. If we can just take that and put it into one year, 12-4, I would love that.”
But the wide receiver’s role is more than just star power and simple arithmetic. Beckham is now looked at to take a more of a leadership position on the offense. He is mentoring the younger receivers like Sterling Shepard, showing them the ropes.
“I just love the feeling of being able to help,” he said after practice Wednesday. “Sometimes guys will come to me with questions, not all the time but they’ll come to me with questions and I’ll give them the best advice that I would give myself. In doing that, I hope that they can just take it, use it and use it the same way that whatever technique they use, just do that and put something into it.”
And what does he tell the young players?
“I think time tells it but at the end of the day,” Beckham said. “What you do in practice isn’t no more or less different than what you would do in a game, there’s just a couple more people, a lot more people there, but I’m fully confident in their abilities and what they’ve done and shown so far that they’ll be able to come out and do that game time
Good advice from a player, who the Giants will lean on this season. Yet, the Giants are hoping the receiver corps will form one of the toughest in the league with Beckham, Shepard and Victor Cruz leading the way.
If all three are healthy, it will create one-on-one situations, which teams will have trouble defending.
“You put two people on me and you have one-on-one with them and I would take them one-on-one pretty much against anyone out there, so it’s going to be a lot of fun,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing how you scheme it up or what exactly you do because I would love to get man-to-man.
“I would love to get two people on me, that’s fine. Just throw it to somebody else. Just keep the chains moving and try and put up as many points as we can.”
Put all of that together and you will have a very good chance of the Giants winning more than those six games this season.
Frankly, with weakness and turmoil from the Cowboys, Eagles and Redskins, the Giants have an extremely good shot to go to the playoffs in Ben McAdoo’s first season as head coach.
Ultimately, for the Giants to do that, Beckham needs to stay healthy and produce the type of season he had his rookie year, when he took the league by storm.
But as of right now, Beckham is getting ready for the season and hoping this could be a return to the playoffs.
“If you look on the paper, yes,” Beckham said. “There’s guys that we’ve added, things that we’ve improved, but at the end of the day the past two years I’ve felt like we weren’t going to be 6-10 and we were, so you never know, it’s those little things. We lost games by three points last year and that’s all things that could’ve been corrected in the second quarter that led all the way to the fourth quarter.
“I do feel as if this team is working harder, I feel as if we have a better chance at definitely being better than 6-10 and that’s obviously the goal. One game at a time. You want to be playing on February 5th in Houston.”
If they do then it would be thanks to Beckham’s star power and maybe even his math skills.
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