LANDOVER, Md. — Abdul Carter didn’t want to dwell on his own performance because the Giants lost Sunday.
“That’s all I care about,” the rookie pass rusher said. “I don’t care about how I play, what I’m doing. As long as the team wins, that’s all I care about.”
But Carter saved anywhere from three to seven points with a huge tackle and quarterback pressure late in the first half of the 21-6 defeat. And he also deflected a Tress Way punt to prevent Washington from pinning the Giants deep with 9:18 remaining in the third quarter.
“My first NFL experience, I enjoyed it,” the No. 3 overall pick in the NFL Draft said. “I just wish we got the win at the end.”
Carter led the Giants with three quarterback pressures, recorded a half-sack of Jayden Daniels with Kayvon Thibodeaux and made three tackles in 35 snaps, per NFL NextGen Stats. That meant he played on 53.8% of the defense’s snaps and still made his mark.
His biggest play came with the Giants trailing 14-3 and the Commanders deep in the red zone with 28 seconds remaining in the second quarter.
Carter tackled Daniels at the 4-yard line on a designed quarterback run to prevent a first down and maybe a touchdown.
Then as Washington scrambled back to the ball with no timeouts, Carter pressured Daniels into an intentional grounding throwaway. The penalty was a 10-second runoff, and the Giants escaped down by only 11 at half.
“That’s what we always try to do,” Carter said of disrupting Washington’s offense. “But we didn’t get the win, so none of it matters in the end.”
Carter also brought a dangerous element to the punt block team, nearly blocking one in the first half and getting his hand on one of Way’s boots in the second.
“I’ll do whatever my coaches ask me to do,” he said. “So wherever they need me, I line up and do it to the best of my ability.”
So Carter was an exciting bright spot on a dark day for the Giants. Nevertheless, that’s what he saw it as: not good enough.
“It don’t really matter,” he said. “If I play really good, really bad, at the end of the day it’s just about getting the win… We had opportunities in the game we didn’t take advantage of.
“We gotta win that game.”
