11:56 am Jan. 23, 2012
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 David Diehl, who played left tackle in the Giants’ 20-17 win yesterday over the San Francisco 49ers.
The big prize is still two weeks away, but whatever happens, the Giants’ second N.F.C. Championship in the past four years ensures that the Tom Coughlin-Eli Manning era will go down in team history as one of the great ones.
Which means that guys like David Diehl, the team’s workmanlike offensive lineman, will see their individual shortcomings whitewashed by nostalgia, and will be remembered instead for being part of something glorious.
This seems particularly fitting for Diehl, a player who, for the good of the team, has twice switched from his natural spot at guard to left tackle, a position he isn’t physiologically suited for.
Michael Lewis’s 2006 book, The Blind Side, popularized the idea that the left tackle, who is charged with the all-important assignment of protecting the quarterback from defenders he does not see, must be a rare breed of athlete who combines a behemoth’s size with a ballerina’s grace.
Diehl doesn't bear any resemblance to that description. While the prototypical left tackle tempers his massive build with angularity, Diehl is built like a refrigerator, with a rectangular torso atop stumpy legs. It’s a classic guard’s build, designed more for road-grading in confined spaces than dancing along the edge with a pass rusher.
Diehl started every game at guard for the first several years of his career, which began in 2003 after he was drafted in the fifth round. But heading into the 2007 season, the Giants parted ways with longtime left tackle Luke Petitgout, a guy who looked like an ideal left tackle but never quite lived up to that promise. As is their wont, the Giants went with an in-house solution, shifting Diehl over to fill the gap.
The move was met with skepticism. Along with the retirement of superstar running back Tiki Barber, the Giants’ non-tackle left tackle was cited as one of the reasons the 2007 Giants were going to be worse than the 2006 Giants, a team that stumbled to an 8-8 record and a first-round playoff exit.
Of course, those 2007 Giants proceeded to win the Super Bowl. Diehl was stellar as a run blocker and held up well enough as a pass blocker. But by no means was he great. Because the Giants defeated the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, it became easy for Giants fans to forget that Diehl almost torpedoed their final drive by repeatedly being beaten around the edge by New England’s Adalius Thomas. Eli Manning’s improbable escape on David Tyree’s miraculous “helmet catch” play was made necessary, in part, by Thomas’ blowing past Diehl. On the very next play, Thomas got by Diehl for a sack. The play after that, Thomas bull-rushed Diehl into Manning and forced a near-interception.
Despite all this, Diehl was decent enough at tackle to hold the position until this year, when he was replaced by Will Beatty, whom the Giants drafted in 2009 and had since groomed as their left tackle of the future. But Beatty went down with injury after the season’s tenth game, and Diehl became the obvious solution. Just as he had in 2007, he moved over from guard.
It hadn’t exactly been going swimmingly for Diehl heading into yesterday. According to Pro Football Focus, Diehl has allowed the most quarterback-pressures per passing snap of anyone in the league, both at guard and at tackle. On the other hand, Diehl’s switch over to tackle, along with some other shuffling along the offensive line, coincided with a drastic improvement in the Giants’ running game. Through their first ten games, the Giants had averaged a league-worst 3.15 yards per carry, well below the league average of 4.3. Since then, they have averaged a much more respectable 4.1.
Still, the Giants had reason to be concerned going into yesterday. Diehl was matched up mostly against San Francisco rookie linebacker Aldon Smith, a superb speed-rusher who came into the game with 14 sacks in the regular season and one in the previous playoff game. Physically, he is everything—quick, lithe—that Diehl is not.
But Diehl held his own against Smith. Late in the first half, he was doing so well that Fox analyst Troy Aikman singled him out for praise, a rare honor for an offensive lineman.
Things got a little rockier for Diehl from that point forward, however. He gave up several pressures, and in overtime, he gave up a third-down sack when he was bull-rushed by All-Pro defensive end Justin Smith. (This immediately preceded the fateful punt that was fumbled by San Francisco’s Kyle Williams that effectively gave the Giants the game.)
But on a day in which Eli Manning dropped back an astounding 64 times, was sacked six times and hit 20 times, Diehl was hardly the biggest problem. That distinction belonged to Kareem McKenzie, who had a much more difficult time with Aldon Smith than Diehl did, and to the Giants’ interior linemen, who were often flummoxed by blitzes and stunts.
So Diehl wasn’t perfect yesterday, and no, he’s not an ideal left tackle, just like 9-7 isn’t an ideal record for a Super Bowl team. But after yesterday’s sloppy, glorious slugfest that put the Giants in the Super Bowl, who cares about perfection?
