ARLINGTON, Texas — James Betcher knows it when he sees it.
He can talk all day and night as to what he wants out of the Giants in his first season as the defensive coordinator, but action always resonates louder than words. Bettcher’s debut running the show for the Giants on defense was a 20-15 loss to the Jaguars and afterward, he felt disappointed and encouraged all at once.
“Make no mistake, we don’t feel great about losing, number one,” Bettcher said this week. “Two, I love the energy and the effort we played with. There’s some plays on tape where there’s balls that are on the sideline and I’m seeing eight, nine and 10 guys show up, and that’s who we have to be and that’s what our opponents need to see on tape when they turn us on, and really, that’s what our fans should expect and deserve from us.”
It was not effort and hustle without production. Bettcher’s unit allowed 13 points, 305 total yards and limited the Jaguars to 4-of-13 on third-down conversions. Most games, this sort of defensive output would translate to a victory. It did not because the much-hyped Giants offense, featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Saquon Barkley and Evan Engram, did not get much going and managed only one touchdown, Barkley’s 68-yard run.
This was the way it was two years ago, when the Giants on defense played winning football and the offense struggled to score and relied too heavily on a brilliant Beckham moment or two. The uneven contributions in 2016 somehow produced an 11-5 record in Ben McAdoo’s first season as head coach, but it was not a sustainable formula.
Bettcher cannot do much about jump-starting the Giants offense, and so he went back to work on his side of the ball preparing for the Cowboys in Week 2. He knows the run-heavy Jaguars were without running back Leonard Fournette for the entire second half after the bruising runner left with a knee injury. Before he was hurt, the Giants were not exactly shutting Fournette down; he had 41 yards on nine rushing attempts. So, there is work to be done.
“There were some plays in the run game that we need to fit better and we need to play better, the backed-up run is a disappointing play certainly because that’s points,’’ Bettcher said. “We hold them backed up, we’re thinking that’s a scoring play on defense, and we just need to execute better. Very encouraged but at the same time, I love the thought that we came in with on Monday. We talked about what we needed to correct, and our guys are really working like pros and are working to correct those things so we can stack that stuff, and we don’t have to go back and correct some of the same stuff over again.”
Bettcher sees signs of progress. He said practice on Wednesday, preparing for the Cowboys, was a stronger practice than the previous Wednesday session. He is a newcomer on the scene after three years running the Cardinals defense in Arizona. There is a sprinkling of new players on the field, starting with inside linebacker Alec Ogletree, who wears the helmet with the radio transmitter and relays Bettcher’s call to the other 10 defenders in the huddle.
“I felt great energy on the field, I really did,” Bettcher said of the Wednesday practice. “I think our guys are building confidence every day. At the end of the day, the years of experience of the players on the field doesn’t matter as much as their experience of snaps playing together. The more these guys play together, the better they’re going to be able to play off of each other and with each other. Defensively, I can see that confidence growing day by day, both in the communication part of it, which is going to be vital, and then the execution of the jobs they need to do.’’Bettcher runs a 3-4 defensive scheme but on certain downs — usually in obvious passing situations for the offense — he will put the Giants in a more traditional four-man front. As he looked back on his own performance in the season opener, he was not pleased with some of the decisions he made.
“I thought there were a couple times in our four-man rush where I just have to coach it a little bit better, that’s really where it starts,” Bettcher said. “I have to get us so we’re not high on rushes and we can field the counters on the perimeter, then in some of our pressures, just understanding if we’re getting the back or we’re getting the tight end, those are the muscle-in situations in the rushes.
“The reality of it is that you try to create one-on-one matchups and you try to win those one-on-one matchups, and make quarterbacks’ timing and thought process have to speed up. There are some good stuff, and there’s some stuff, in terms of the edge and feeling how high we are in rushes also, some of the one-on-ones we need to do a better job of.”