What will the Giants do with Kayvon Thibodeaux and Evan Neal?
With the NFL regular season now ended and Pro Bowl selections made, it is possible to anticipate an important decision almost every general manager has to make: Whether to exercise the fifth-year option on your first round draft pick(s). The Pro Bowl has never had the “juice” of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which at one time was a truly competitive game played for pride between the two leagues which otherwise never met except in the World Series. Now, there isn’t even an actual Pro Bowl game anymore, making it completely meaningless, with one important exception: Fan voting accounts for one-third of the final tally that determines who gets selected. You can know nothing and still vote. You can stuff the ballot box for your brother if he’s an NFL player even if he’s back of the roster and help get him in. It’s the one way in which NFL fans are truly empowered. Never mind flying banners over MetLife Stadium.
What’s amazing about this is that the fans can wind up indirectly affecting NFL player contracts. Before a first-round draftee’s fourth NFL year, his GM has to decide whether to pick up his fifth-year option. A set formula determines the salary of a player whose option is picked up. It depends in part on playing time, which introduces its own perverse bias: An OK player on a bad team who starts because his team has no one better gets more if his option is picked up than a better player on a good team who sees the field less because the roster is stacked at his position. The big thing, though, is that your option is higher if you’ve made a Pro Bowl, and even more so if you’ve made multiple Pro Bowls. So we, the fans, cost our team future cap space if we help get our favorite player voted in. (Note for future reference: It only counts if you make the Pro Bowl on the original selection, so Malik Nabers getting in as an alternate will not count toward his fifth-year option in a couple of years.)
The people at Over The Cap do a great job tracking these things. Here are their fifth-year option projections for the 2022 draft class:
This chart is fascinating because it provides fairly direct evidence that a belief of many fans is nothing more than a myth: “A GM has to hit on his first-round picks.” Giants fans in particular raise this issue about Joe Schoen, who has drafted Kayvon Thibodeaux, Evan Neal, Deonte Banks, and Malik Nabers in the first round since becoming Giants GM. Fans rarely define what a “hit” is; usually it’s a matter of “you know it when you see it.” So based on one season’s work, I think it’s fair to say that Nabers is a “hit,” even if you thought Schoen should have taken J.J. McCarthy. Deonte Banks looked like he was going to be a “hit” for about half his rookie year, and then the bottom fell out.
Those option decisions are in the future, though. This year, Thibodeaux and Neal are the focus. Neal did not reach any of the incentives for an escalated fifth-year option, not even the playtime incentive, mostly because of his injuries. Even so, picking up his option would cost $17.4M in 2026 (based on the average of the third to 25th-highest salaries at his position over the past five years). That’s a high number given his performance, so it seems certain that Schoen will decline the option on Neal. Still, if you look at his numbers, there is at least something to think about:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
Under Carmen Bricillo, Neal improved dramatically as a run blocker in 2024. It never made sense that he was so bad at that, because that was his calling card at Alabama. Neal’s 80.8 PFF run block grade was ninth in the NFL last season. In zone blocking, his 90.9 grade was 4th best, while in gap/man blocking he graded an adequate 66.4. In pass blocking, though, he graded only 49.6, and his sacks/hits/hurries were only marginally better than in his first two seasons, scaling for number of snaps played. In the NFL, if you can’t pass block, you can’t start. Picking up Neal’s option would put him 11th among NFL right tackles at 2024 rates. Jermaine Eluemunor, a better player and an emerging team leader, is making $7M. The Giants would be best served extending him instead and parting ways with Neal unless his pass blocking improves in 2025.
Thibodeaux is the much more interesting case. Thibodeaux did reach the playtime incentive level for the fifth-year option, which is $16.1M for edge defenders, but he did not make any Pro Bowls. In some but not all respects his 2024 season was a step back from his first two years:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
Scaling for the time lost to injury, he put more pressure on the quarterback in 2024 per pass snap played than in his first two years, and his pass rush grade was his highest by a bit, but the sacks were way down from 2023 and his tackling was horrendous.
$16.1M seems like a lot to pay for that level of production, and most Giants fans tend to feel that Schoen wasted the No. 5 pick in 2022 by selecting Thibodeaux. Take a closer look, though. That amount would place Thibodeaux 19th among 2024 edge defender salaries. That’s just ahead of Uchenna Nwosu, a player who has had basically one really good season and has only played two full seasons out of seven because of recurring injuries. The thing is, edge defender is a key position in today’s NFL and is not getting any cheaper. Five players already make at least $25M, and that’s 2024; by 2026, $16.1M may look like a bargain for a player who, although not having lived up to expectations, is at least a solid starter.
That’s the thing about the fifth-year option. It always sounds like a lot of money, but it’s two years into the future money that our human brains compare to the 2024 salaries we know about now despite the never-ending escalating salaries that arise from the NFL money-printing machine.
Fans, and sometimes GMs, take a “buyer beware” approach to these decisions when players haven’t reached expectations. The classic Giants example? Daniel Jones. Schoen could have had him for $22.4M in 2023 but declined his fifth-year option before the 2022 season. That turned out to be a terrible if understandable mistake. Jones had his best season and parlayed that into his four-year, $160M contract. Had Schoen picked up the option, he would have had less cap space to work with in 2023 because he couldn’t play the prorated signing bonus game. He would however have been free and clear of his financial commitment to Jones after the 2023 season and could have pivoted to a different quarterback in 2024.
The other thing about the fifth-year option is that it provides a convenient measuring stick for how good a given GM and his staff are at drafting. There are two ways to assess that. Schoen scores pretty high when it comes to finding bargains on Day 3 of the draft: Micah McFadden (Round 5), Tyrone Tracy (Round 5), and Theo Johnson (Round 4) have all become starters, and at least the first two of them look like above-average players. Darius Muasau in Round 6 at least looks like good depth, and Tre Hawkins had one of the Giants’ only “real” (not off a deflection) interceptions this season.
Round 1, though, has not been so kind, with none of Thibodeaux, Neal, or Banks having distinguished themselves. (Thank goodness for Nabers.) That’s part of the case to be made against Schoen. Is it, though? How do we define a great first round pick? The OTC chart of fifth year options at the top of this article provides a convenient measure. If every GM “hit” on his first round pick, then all of them would be elite or at least very good players. Here’s what the chart actually tells us about GM skill:
- Only three first rounders from 2022 have been to multiple Pro Bowls (Sauce Gardner, Kyle Hamilton, Tyler Linderbaum) and only three more to one Pro Bowl (Aidan Hutchinson, Tyler Linderbaum, Tyler Smith). That’s six “elite” players out of 32, or a 19% “hit” rate.
- If we take a broader definition of a “hit” as a player who has at least played a large percentage of his team’s snaps, then we can add 12 more players to the list, including Thibodeaux but not Neal. That brings the total to 18 out of 32, or 56%, of first-round picks as “hits.” (Note that only 31 picks are listed in the table – that’s because Lewis Cine, chosen by the Vikings at No. 32, was cut after two seasons.). Sometimes it’s due to injury rather than quality of play (e.g., Chris Olave), but as they say, the best ability is availability.
That’s just for the 2022 season, but it’s pretty much in line with other recent seasons. If “a GM has to hit on his draft picks,” well, that says that half the GMs in the NFL are no good in any single season, and if you put together multiple seasons, you find that the “great” GM this year doesn’t look so great the next year a lot of the time. It’s just like actively managed mutual funds. The “hot” stock picker highlighted in the business section of the newspaper or on CNBC or in some financial blog for beating the market this year usually doesn’t do as well next year. Unfortunately the NFL doesn’t have the equivalent of index mutual funds for GMs. It does have “penny stocks,” though (undrafted free agents) – Schoen, e.g., may have hit on Elijah Chatman for pennies on the dollar.
Take the Baltimore Ravens, for example. They have the reputation of being among the shrewdest front offices in the NFL, over many years and several GMs. They traded back into the first round in 2018 and got Lamar Jackson. In 2022, the subject of this year’s fifth-round option decisions, they selected Hamilton and Linderbaum, two of the three multiple Pro Bowl first rounders the league produced. From the 2024 draft, though, only cornerback Nate Wiggins and tackle Roger Rosengarten earned starting positions, and while both played adequately neither stood out.
The bottom line for the Giants is that Schoen has a difficult decision to make on Thibodeaux. He’s not what you hope a high first-round pick will become, but he’s a capable, maybe even good, player who occasionally makes important plays. The temptation is to let him walk after next season or to try to trade him before then. Giants fans always default to the option of getting rid of players. The problem is that you have to replace them with someone.
Realistically, a team needs three plus players at the edge defender position, because those players shouldn’t be on the field for more than about two-thirds of defensive snaps. Brian Burns is the Giants’ only clear plus player at the position at the moment. Azeez Ojulari often looks good in pass rush situations, but he can’t fit the run and he can’t stay on the field. Bringing him back on a cheap contract would make sense, but only as depth. Use the No. 3 pick on Abdul Carter? Sure, but (a) then you don’t get one of the top two quarterbacks or Travis Hunter, and (b) he may be the next Micah Parsons but he may be the next Ojulari.
The one good thing about the fifth-year option is that the deadline for exercising it is May 1, after the draft. Thus, the Giants can wait until they know whether Carter or another high profile edge prospect is in the fold before making their decision. Regardless, keeping Thibodeaux for a fifth year may make sense – an edge room led by Burns, Thibodeaux, and Carter in 2025 sounds appealing.