1:36 pm Nov. 14, 2011
Each time the Giants or Jets play a football game, Capital will write about a home-team member who took part in it. This post is about Kareem McKenzie, who played right tackle in the Giants’ 27-20 loss to the San Francisco 49ers.
“It’s a piece here, a piece there that hasn’t come together,” Kareem McKenzie, the Giants’ 32-year-old right tackle, explained to me two weeks ago in the locker room of the Giants' practice facility.
He was talking about the Giants’ running game, which had been the strength of the offense more or less since McKenzie came to the team in 2005, but which at that moment ranked among the league’s worst.
A week later, he would be answering questions on a significantly more unpleasant topic: The sex-abuse scandal at Penn State, his alma mater, from which he graduated in three-and-a-half years with a degree in business management.
But when we spoke, the focus was on football, and the progress of the Giants' rushing game.
“It’s something where we still continue to have to work on it," he said. "It’s something we have to stick with.”
After yesterday's loss to the 49ers, this still applies. Of the Giants' 27 designed running plays, they gained an average of 3.2 yards, more than a yard worse than the league average and a tick worse than even their season average of 3.3, which ranks fourth-to-last in the league.
It's hard, and arguably a fool's errand in any case, to isolate a culprit for this lack of productivity from among the offensive linemen. For instance, yesterday, McKenzie seemed to do a decent enough job executing his assignments in the running game. Yes, he clearly whiffed on a block on a 2nd down late in the Giants’ first series, leading to a difficult third down that they did not covert and forcing them to settle for a field goal. But other than that, he did OK.
And really, the whole offensive line seemed to do OK. There were some nice holes, but running back Brandon Jacobs—who at this point looks like an old station wagon with an alarmingly high odometer reading, and whose reputation as a usable player would figure to be on life support—didn’t exploit them fully.
By the end of the game, while the Giants were driving to try to tie the score, the Fox telecast kept training its cameras on Jacobs, who stood on the sideline watching theretofore little-used D.J. Ware get the crunch-time carries.
So the offensive line will continue to work on putting the pieces together, just like McKenzie said. But maybe, given Jacobs’ struggles and fellow running back Ahmad Bradshaw’s foot injury putting his status in jeopardy, McKenzie and company will be blocking for a new set of backs sooner rather than later.
ONE VERY VIVID IMAGE OF KAREEM MCKENZIE sticks with me.
It was during training camp at the University of Albany, 2010, and the Giants had just concluded their second practice of the day. By team protocol, a handful of players are assigned to stay after practice and sign autographs for a few minutes. It’s a nice custom—the upstate fans always seem particularly glad for a chance to see the players up close—and from everything I’ve seen, the players are pleasant about it.
That day was McKenzie’s day to sign. He’s a mountainous man, at 6-foot-6, 330 pounds, and the effect is accentuated by his giant shaved head and dignified beard. On that day, it looked as if the energy required of him to walk off the field—to lift one of his massive legs, put it down, then do the same thing with the other, then repeat the act—was almost too much for him. He wasn’t limping; rather, he was just completely spent. Somehow, he managed to make it over to the fans.
“McKenzie!” yelled some, reading the name on the back of his jersey.
“Kareem!” yelled others, showing him they knew who he was.
McKenzie began at the beginning of where the bleachers met the stands and started signing. As far as I know, he signed for every single person, although that isn’t the point. Rather, it’s about the way he signed: slowly, with weariness in every movement. He gathered himself to pick up his arms to grab a kid’s program. Then he gathered himself again to lift his hand to sign. He took frequent breaks between autographs, during which he breathed deeply and heavingly, his shoulder pads going up and down by what looked like a foot. He had a dazed, far-away look on his face, as if he was too exhausted even to partake in the moment. He couldn’t even muster a “there you go!” expression for the kid he had just signed for.
He was 31 years old then, and had been spending the better part of the past few weeks killing himself in the blazing heat with mostly younger, smaller guys. Training camp is hardest on the big guys, and that was especially true before the new collective agreement prohibited “two-a-days,” or two practices in full pads each day.
The season before, the Giants offensive line had appeared to make a sudden concession to age: It had gone from being the league’s best line in 2008 to below-average in 2009, as the running game plummeted from 1st in yards-per-attempt to 20th. They had gotten old, and fast, the consensus was. McKenzie was one of four starters born during the Carter administration. And there he was, back for another season, looking like he might keel over and die right there.
Then McKenzie went out and had an outstanding year. According to Pro Football Focus, a website that grades every player on every play, McKenzie was the third-best tackle in all of football in 2010. That capped a three-year span in which he ranked an impressive 10th and 12th among the 70-something offensive tackles ranked.
That might seem high to Giants fans, but it also should force them to acknowledge that they’ve taken McKenzie’s workmanlike excellence at right tackle for granted. The old cliché goes that offensive linemen are like referees: If you don’t notice them, they’re doing their job. That adage applies to McKenzie over the better part of the past decade.
He started his career with the Jets but came to the Giants in 2005, the least heralded of a group of three free agents the Giants brought in, along with Antonio Pierce and Plaxico Burress. That 2005 team went 11-5 and won the division. It was the first year of a run of Giants teams that, give or take the vicissitudes of injuries and bounces of the ball, has played at a relatively constant level ever since. Pierce and Burress are long gone, but McKenzie is still around.
For most of this time, nearly all of his offensive linemates have been around with him. From 2005 thorough last year, the Giants have held together a core group which most years included McKenzie, Chris Snee, Rich Seubert, David Diehl and Shaun O’Hara. This year, the Giants parted ways with the aging Seubert and O’Hara and replaced them with Will Beatty and David Baas. It was hardly a radical change, but the results this year have not matched the standards of this generation of Giants line-play. McKenzie has not been immune, and has slipped to 41st in the Pro Football Focus rankings.
Perhaps for this reason, when I asked him what his best attribute as a player, he told me, “I don’t think in those terms. If you think in the terms of the finality about what you do best, it can almost, to a certain extent, become your crutch. You never want to go ahead and give yourself a rating of what you do well. You always want to constantly improve everything.”
Certainly, the ground in the NFL is always shifting. The best running team can become one of the worst, and then one of the best, and then one of the worst again. Nothing is fixed. Any time a football player spends reflecting upon his strengths would be better spent thinking about ways to fix his weaknesses.
Still, McKenzie spoke of the advantages of playing with the same core group of linemen over the years. One often hears about how important it is to have continuity along the offensive line. McKenzie, whose speech patterns tend toward the formal, gave me an analogy for what, exactly, this means.
“Put it this way: It’s like a long-term marriage,” he said. “You know what your given wife’s gonna do or whatever the case may be. You know how someone’s gonna respond, whether it’s a girlfriend, so forth and so on. So you know when you say a certain thing, it’s gonna bring about a certain response, to the point where you know that you know what’s gonna be said, whether they’re gonna be mad, upset, or whatever the case may be. It’s the same thing with us. We’ve been around each other so long, we can see the same things, and know what each other are thinking, to a certain extent.”
This has enabled the Giants blocking schemes to evolve.
“When I got here, it was just the rudiments of what we’re doing now," he said. "We’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were when I first got here."
A fundamental truth about the NFL is that even the best-planned schemes can be undone by poor execution. That’s something the Giants offensive line is still working on.
