The Giants Have More Interesting Players Than Available Fantasy Points

For approximately five minutes last season, the New York Giants appeared to have found something.

Jaxson Dart looked like a quarterback.

Cam Skattebo looked like he had been created in a laboratory where scientists were attempting to make a running back entirely out of spite.

The offense was scoring again.

There was hope.

Naturally, Malik Nabers tore his ACL during Dart's first NFL start. Skattebo suffered a season-ending ankle injury four weeks later. Brian Daboll was fired in November. The Giants finished 4–13.

Being a Giants fan remains an unusually elaborate loyalty program.

But here's the important part for fantasy:

The offense actually got better in 2025.

And AutoDraftYears thinks it is about to get substantially worse.

That is the real question entering 2026:

Was last year's offensive improvement the beginning of something, or just one strange year before another Giants relapse?

2025: Bad team, surprisingly functional offense

The Giants finished 4–13, last in the NFC East.

That part was familiar.

The offense was not.

New York scored 381 points, or 22.4 per game, 17th in the NFL. A year earlier, the Giants had averaged only 16.1.

Going from 16.1 to 22.4 doesn't turn MetLife Stadium into Greatest Show on Turf East.

It does qualify as evidence of life.

And most of the optimism arrived with Dart.

The rookie eventually started 12 games and finished with 2,272 passing yards, 15 passing touchdowns and only five interceptions. More importantly for fantasy managers, he added 487 rushing yards and nine rushing touchdowns.

There it is.

The phrase capable of making fantasy managers temporarily lose access to the part of the brain responsible for price sensitivity:

rushing quarterback.

Dart's first start came in Week 4 against the Chargers. The Giants won 21–18.

It should have been the happiest day of their season.

Instead, Nabers tore his ACL in the second quarter while attempting to catch a deep ball from Dart. He finished 2025 with just 18 catches for 271 yards and two touchdowns in four games.

The Giants then discovered Skattebo.

Before his rookie season ended with a dislocated ankle against Philadelphia, he had rushed for 410 yards and five touchdowns and caught 24 passes for another 207 yards and two scores.

So the season became this odd combination of legitimate progress and falling furniture.

The Giants found their young quarterback.

They found an interesting running back.

The offense became watchable.

They also lost nine consecutive games during the second half of the season, fired Daboll, and somehow arrived at January with the fifth pick in the draft. They at least finished with consecutive 34-point wins over Las Vegas and Dallas, because apparently optimism needed one final opportunity to get itself hurt.

And then they changed basically everything

New York hired John Harbaugh in January after his 18-year run in Baltimore.

The Giants then built an offensive staff featuring Matt Nagy, Brian Callahan and Greg Roman, signed former Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely and fullback Patrick Ricard, and used the No. 10 pick on offensive lineman Francis Mauigoa.

This does not exactly scream:

Throw 48 times and see what happens.

Giants.com's own offseason analysis has repeatedly suggested the new offense will emphasize the running game, with Roman's influence, Ricard's arrival and Skattebo's style all pointing that direction.

Which makes what AutoDraftYears sees next particularly interesting.

The model does not believe in the progress

Here is 2025 versus the 2026 forecast:

AutoDraftYears projects New York 31st in scoring.

Its positional environments rank:

• QB: 29th
• RB: 30th
• WR: 30th
• TE: 30th

The 30 historical offenses most similar to this forecast produced only 1.5 fantasy starters per season on average. The bear/base/bull outcome was basically one/two/two starters.

That is the part I care about.

Because fantasy managers rarely draft the Giants offense.

We draft Malik Nabers.

Then Jaxson Dart looks fun.

Then Skattebo falls half a round.

Then Isaiah Likely is sitting there.

Then Tyrone Tracy becomes interesting late.

Suddenly we have constructed the 2007 Patriots out of a team our model expects to score 18.7 points per game.

Somebody eventually has to account for the touchdowns.

One number actually likes the Giants

Here's the wrinkle.

Convert every NFL roster into expected fantasy value and the market puts New York 20th.

AutoDraftYears puts them 7th.

Thirteen places, which clears the eight the model needs before it will call a roster mispriced at all.

So at the team level this is one of the larger disagreements in the league, and it lands in the Giants' favor.

Then you open the board and the model wants approximately none of it.

Nabers: fade.

Dart: fade.

Likely: fade.

That isn't a contradiction. It's this entire page compressed into one paragraph.

A roster can hold real value in aggregate and still be priced badly one player at a time.

The Giants have the players.

The market has already charged for each of them.

And the offense underneath still only supports about 1.5 fantasy starters.

Interesting collection.

Inconvenient prices.

Malik Nabers is where this gets uncomfortable

The current model snapshot has:

Nabers is the hardest one.

His role score is 78/100. His risk grade is low. And as of August 17, he had returned to team drills and was catching passes during competitive periods as he works back from the ACL injury.

So the model isn't really making an injury argument.

It is making a price plus environment argument.

The market wants WR13.

The model sees WR49 inside its 30th-ranked receiver environment.

Could Nabers ignore the offense and command 150 targets?

Absolutely.

But WR13 prices require more than "he's talented enough to survive this."

You're paying for the survival in advance.

Dart is exciting. QB12 already knows that.

Dart's rushing isn't theoretical.

We watched him run for 487 yards and nine touchdowns as a rookie.

That gives him exactly the kind of fantasy cheat code capable of making a mediocre passing environment irrelevant.

The problem is that the market has noticed.

He's already QB12.

AutoDraftYears has him QB21, and similar historical offenses produced a top-12 quarterback only 7% of the time.

I like Dart.

I just like him more when I'm not required to pay for the Year 2 breakout before Year 2 happens.

Isaiah Likely may be the best test of the model

Likely is TE12 in the market and TE28 in AutoDraftYears.

That is a substantial fade.

But this one deserves nuance.

The Giants did not accidentally acquire Likely. They signed him immediately in free agency, reunited him with Harbaugh, and training-camp reporting has suggested the tight ends could be a major part of the passing game.

That's the bull case.

The problem?

TE12 is already charging admission to see it.

If Likely were TE20, I'd be much more interested in finding out how prominently Nagy and Roman plan to use him.

At TE12, we're paying for the answer before the exam.

The running backs need one fresh model run

Skattebo had returned from his ankle injury and played in the preseason opener, carrying four times for 19 yards.

The model snapshot has him almost perfectly priced at RB19 and Tracy as an interesting-but-not-actionable value at RB47 versus model RB27.

But there is now a new variable.

On August 18, the Giants signed Najee Harris.

That doesn't automatically destroy either player's fantasy value.

It does mean I would rerun the workload assumptions before treating the current RB rankings as final.

Fantasy football changes quickly.

Occasionally it has the courtesy to change while you're literally writing the article.

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 5, RB 15, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

What should fantasy managers do?

The Giants aren't a team I want to avoid entirely.

They're a team where I want to stop granting every player his own separate optimistic future.

Dart can break out.

Nabers can overcome the environment.

Skattebo can command the backfield.

Likely can become a featured target.

All of those statements are individually reasonable.

The problem starts when we assume all four happen together.

AutoDraftYears sees an offense producing 18.7 points per game and historical teams like it supporting around 1.5 fantasy starters.

So make New York beat you on price.

Don't pay WR13 because Nabers is too talented to fail.

Don't pay QB12 because Dart has rushing upside.

Don't pay TE12 because Likely finally has opportunity.

Those stories may all be true.

They just have to share one football.

What I'm watching in September

Two numbers.

Red-zone trips: 3.5 last year versus a model forecast of 2.6.

And pass rate: 50.7% last year versus the model's 57.5%, despite an offseason that appears designed to emphasize the run.

If the Giants are generating red-zone trips closer to 2025 levels, the model's 18.7-point forecast may be too pessimistic.

If the new Harbaugh offense is also more efficient than expected?

Then I'll happily admit the spreadsheet ruined a perfectly good Giants breakout party for no reason.

Until then, I'm not drafting four separate success stories and pretending they don't all live at the same address.

Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.