The Giants will launch their fourth training camp under GM Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll with a Wednesday morning practice in East Rutherford, N.J.
The Daily News will be on the field every day to chronicle the biggest position battles, top storylines and breaking news as the Giants work to bounce back from a 3-14 season.
Here are 10 of the top storylines fans to monitor as Daboll prepares his team in the summer heat:
SCHOEN, DABOLL ON HOT SEATS
Schoen and Daboll both are on borrowed time after keeping their jobs despite winning three of 17 games during the franchise’s 100th season. There were people on the personnel side of the Giants building who wouldn’t have minded overturning the coaching staff for 2025.
Coming out of their tense end of season autopsy, Schoen and Daboll largely were working as separate entities through a large part of this offseason. And since trading up to select Jaxson Dart, Schoen has gone out of his way to make clear the QB was Daboll’s preference.
Both men are in the fourth year of a five-year contract. Schoen feels like he’s more protected at the ownership level than Daboll, but if the team continues its pattern of losing early, the finger pointing could escalate quickly.
There is a good chance that defensive coordinator Shane Bowen will be the first internal scapegoat, though. Bowen was at risk of being replaced after last season — when co-owner John Mara singled out his unit as underperforming. And the discourse around the team is now about how many assets the front office has given the defense and whether Bowen will properly deploy them.
Daboll, meanwhile, looks like he’s giving offensive playcalling back to coordinator Mike Kafka, who was on the headset all spring. Mara — who took the unprecedented step of not speaking to the media at the March owners meetings — suggested Daboll consider giving up playcalling in their end-of-season meeting.
Buckle up. It will be a bumpy ride, but it won’t be boring.
WHEN WILL JAXSON DART PLAY?
The Giants tried to trade for the Rams’ Matthew Stafford to replace Daniel Jones at quarterback. They aimed for Aaron Rodgers. They talked to Joe Flacco. They tried to talk to Mason Rudolph. They tried to trade for the Titans’ No. 1 overall pick to take Cam Ward. And they were hot on Shedeur Sanders’ trail for a while during the pre-draft process.
Ultimately, Schoen and Daboll assembled a quarterback room of Russell Wilson, Jameis Winston, first-round pick Jaxson Dart and incumbent backup Tommy DeVito.
So far the team has handed Wilson the keys as the presumptive Week 1 starter. That invites questions about whether Winston will remain on the team or become a trade candidate, since Dart is being groomed to take over behind him.
And if Wilson struggles and Dart is ready, they would have to play the rookie to try to save their jobs if nothing else. The question is how early Dart will play.
When teams draft quarterbacks in the first round, normally the QB plays a lot earlier than expected. If Wilson and the Giants offense start hot out of the gate, the team will have the luxury of taking its time developing Dart behind the scenes.
Any early hiccups could mean early snaps for Dart, though, all the way up to winning the Week 1 starting job if Schoen and Daboll are willing to make this a competition. They’ve shown no indication of doing that yet.
CAN NABERS TAKE ANOTHER STEP?
Wide receiver Malik Nabers, 21, the sixth overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, caught 109 passes for 1,204 yards and seven touchdowns last season. Now the Giants are expecting even more from him after changing very little on offense outside of swapping QBs.
Nabers is still very young, though. He struggled dealing with last season’s losing, calling out Daboll’s playcalling and flaunting some rough body language. He was force-fed 170 targets as a rookie, which feels unsustainable.
He suffered a tragic loss this offseason when his college teammate, Kyren Lacy, died in April at age 24. And the Giants held Nabers out of on-field practices all spring, with Daboll saying it was related to an injury that dated back to college. He also did not do an interview with the local media in the spring.
The Giants are putting a lot on Nabers this fall. He has elite talent. It just remains to be seen if he will be able to grow and handle adversity with a steady, consistent hand. That could come in many forms, including defenses paying extra attention to him with a year of film to study.
ABDUL MAY BE THE X-FACTOR
No. 3 overall pick Abdul Carter flashed impressive twitch, explosiveness, pass rush ability and versatility in some spring practices. Bowen already has used him in practice as an off-ball linebacker in pass coverage, a blitzing off-ball linebacker, a traditional edge rusher and an interior pass rusher in third-down packages.
It remains to be seen when and how often Carter will get on the field with Brian Burns and Kayvon Thibodeaux already in the edge rush rotation. But Carter might end up being the biggest upgrade on the 2025 roster when all is said and done.
THIBS LOOKS MOTIVATED
Thibodeaux, Schoen’s first ever Giants draft pick at No. 5 overall in 2022, sees the writing on the wall. While the team picked up his fifth-year option for 2026, Thibodeaux’s recent underperformance and Carter’s selection have created a potential redundancy on the roster.
Having a stable of pass rushers who don’t have to play 100% of the snaps is ideal, but if Thibodeaux starts getting phased out of the rotation because Carter is emerging quickly, the Giants will have a decision to make: trade him, extend him or pay him $14.7 million on his fifth-year option salary in 2026.
The last option seems like a non-starter given the Giants’ enormous investment in Burns and Carter’s addition. So Thibodeaux basically is in a contract year, and he’s acting like it.
He practiced with his hair on fire in the spring. And he is noticeably stronger from his offseason training. Will that translate into results? That’s the final piece to watch.
THOMAS & THE O-LINE MEAN EVERYTHING
As always, the Giants will go as their offensive line goes. And for many years now, it mostly has gone poorly due to bad personnel decisions, subpar play and injuries.
At the moment, Schoen and Daboll seemingly have elected to run back last year’s starting five of Andrew Thomas, Jon Runyan Jr., John Michael Schmitz, Greg Van Roten and Jermaine Eluemunor, from left to right.
Schoen signed James Hudson III to be an improvement at swing tackle, and he practiced all spring as the top left tackle while Thomas (Lisfranc) continued being cautious with an injury that required surgery last October.
And Evan Neal and Jake Kubas are competing and pushing at guard, with Neal — Schoen’s No.7 overall pick as a tackle in 2022 — making a long overdue position switch. Runyan only started practicing later in the spring after recovering from an apparent surgery in the early offseason.
Still, this is largely the same group as last year. Schoen and Daboll kept saying they were good enough before Thomas got hurt. They’d better be right. Wilson is way less mobile than Jones was at quarterback. Without solid protection, the calls for the more mobile Dart will start immediately.
SELL, SELL SELL!
The Giants are in the process of trying to sell a 10% minority share in ownership of the franchise. Eli Manning recently backed out, saying the high price and some conflicts of interest with his current jobs made him a poor fit. But with private equity firms now eligible to buy up to 10% of NFL teams, the Giants promise to find a buyer.
So there will be news about who will be jumping on board with the Mara and Tisch families at some point.
In the meantime, there have been some behind the scenes staff cutbacks with an eye on making the business as attractive as possible. And the retention of Schoen and Daboll after a 3-14 season was viewed by some league sources as financially motivated to avoid saddling the organization with tens of millions in owed money on top of their new hires.
INJURIES ARE ALWAYS AN ISSUE
Tons of Giants players were limited or kept off the field entirely this spring, including Nabers, Dexter Lawrence and Thomas. Linebacker Bobby Okereke even missed a lot of on-field work. Rookies Darius Alexander and Cam Skattebo did little to nothing.
Some of this is injury management. Some of it is load management. It’s all part of a constantly evolving process that the Giants just never seem to get right.
Injuries to top players — and many players — is a frustrating and recurring theme for the organization. And the blame goes well past all of the head coaches in recent years to the training staff, management and ownership.
However they do it, they need to keep their key players and the bulk of their contributors on the field, as they were able to do on the top end in 2022. That’s when Jones, Saquon Barkley, Thomas and Lawrence all were able to stay on the field and help the club record its only playoff win since 2011.
STOP THE RUN
Lawrence, who did not do an interview with the local media in the spring, is a star at defensive tackle. But he’s not enough to stop the run consistently. The Giants need a lot more from their interior defensive line.
They signed end Chauncey Gholston, drafted Alexander in the third round and added Roy Robertson-Harris and Jeremiah Ledbetter in free agency. There is no guarantee this group will be a marked improvement, though, especially because the Giants’ edge rushers — while they have pedigree and promise rushing the passer — are not standout run defenders.
D-line coach Andre Patterson unforgettably blamed the corners’ and secondary’s tackling for the team’s poor run defense last season. And the club scapegoated defensive backs coach Jerome Henderson and safeties coach Mike Treier.
Everyone knows that run defense starts up front, though, on the interior defensive line. That’s what has to get better.
POSITION BATTLES TO WATCH
Former first round pick Deonte Banks looked like he had possibly been demoted to the second string at corner behind Cor’Dale Flott during the spring. That likely set the table for a camp competition for Banks to earn his spot rather than having it handed to him in a secondary that includes new free agent signings corner Paulson Adebo and safety Jevon Holland.
At inside linebacker, Okereke and Micah McFadden return as the incumbent starters, but after questions about Okereke’s place on the roster in the early offseason, former sixth-round Darius Muasau saw a ton of snaps in Okereke’s partial spring absence. So that’s a dynamic to watch, since Okereke had fallen out of favor with some decision makers immediately after last season.
The receiver depth chart pretty much looks the same. The question there is whether the Giants will sign someone else. They poked around on free agent Gabe Davis. And any significant addition to the receiver room might reduce Wan’Dale Robinson’s role in the slot, if not create more of a rotation that sees a different sharing of snaps.
Otherwise, the roster profiles very similarly to last season for now. Unless Winston and Dart turn this quarterback room into a competition. That would make this something different entirely.
