Wide Receiver Darius Slayton

Q: Have you talked with or seen (wide receiver) Malik (Nabers)? What's your feeling on his spirits as he goes through a concussion? I know you went through one a couple weeks ago yourself.

DARIUS SLAYTON: He's doing well. I saw him today for the first time since Friday, but he was in good spirits. He's doing what he needs to do to. Concussion, all you can really do is keep your eyes closed. He's handling that and he's in good spirits.

Q: How hard is that to go through, having you just gone through one versus when you have a hand injury or a toe injury or whatever?

DARIUS SLAYTON: It varies for everybody. It can affect your mood, your sensitivity to things, your vision, different things. For everybody it's different, but he's handling it well and I think he'll be all right.

Q: And then the other guy I'd ask about is (wide receiver) Jalin Hyatt. From your experience a couple years ago when you weren't playing much, how frustrating that can be, and you obviously worked yourself back. I think you led the team in receiving yards that year. How did you handle it? What would your advice be to a young kid about how not playing as much as he thought he would be?

DARIUS SLAYTON: That's the NFL. It's a very competitive league. Specifically, our team, we have a lot of good players on our team. Your maybe lack of playing or involvement at times is not always an indictment on you. Sometimes it's just the situation you're in, the people you're around. Obviously Jalin knows he's a talented player. He knows he can help his team win. And we know he's a talented player. We know he can help this team win. But it's a long year. We've only played four games. The kind of dark reality of the NFL, sooner or later, somebody's going to get hurt. Stuff happens. In one way, shape, or form, this opportunity will come. For us as players, your job is just to be ready for whenever that opportunity presents itself.

Q: You're now four games into the season. I know it's still early, as you said, but it is basically the quarter point. What do you view your offensive identity at this point through four games?

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think we've done a pretty consistent job of moving the ball over the past three weeks, specifically. I think outside of game one, I think last three games, like I said, we've moved the ball really well. We've gotten into scoring position fairly consistently. We just haven't been able to finish in the red zone like we wanted to, obviously, this last game, specifically. But I think on offense, we've done a good job establishing the run game at times. In the Washington game, we ran it really well. We ran it pretty well against Cleveland. Not as great against Dallas, but most of that was self-inflicted wounds. I think we've also done a pretty good job on offense of being efficient. I think we've wanted to maybe hit some of the more explosive, bigger plays. We've hit a couple of them, obviously could have hit more, but we've done a good job of being efficient, moving the chains and sustaining drives.

Q: You guys talked a lot about getting those deep shots this offseason. It hasn't exactly happened. I'm wondering if you view yourself as like a quick passing team, a running team that can pound it or play action team that's trying to hit deep balls. What do you see when I ask you that?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, I think we've tried to get the shots up. We've gotten them up a couple of times, we just haven't converted on them at as high of a clip as we would want to. And the reality of deep shots is you only hit – everybody hits a small percentage of them anyways. They're not easy plays to complete, but obviously we'd like to have completed more than we have to this point. But all you can do is get the shots up and try to make them when you get them.

Q: With the weekend off, people who are in other professions don't usually watch their profession. They get away from it. Did you watch a lot of NFL football since Thursday night?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, I watched a decent amount.

Q: I'm always curious as a player when you just sit back and watch and you see what other teams are doing offensively, either good or bad. And then you look at your team. Do you either get ideas or just look and say, 'they're making it look easier. We're having too hard time...'

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think when you watch the NFL specifically, you start to realize that sometimes you think that it's all going great for some team or another. Depending on what time you play on a Sunday, you don't necessarily watch their game. For example, the Bills before last night, they were rolling. I think they put up almost 40 or they put at least 30 plus every game. Were firing people up. And then last night they're playing Ravens, and they look like they're in Hell. The NFL is like that. The Saints, pretty sure they came out, put up 40 in two or three games in row, too and then they played the Falcons yesterday and they lost the game to a game winning field goal. So, you realize that sometimes you have a perception because of media and highlights and things like, oh, 'There's bombs over Baghdad there.' Then you sit down, you watch a game, and they've got 10 points in four quarters, and they have to rely on a 58-yard field goal to win the game. It just kind of shows you that this league's really competitive. You're not just going to go out there and beat the brakes off everybody. You're going to have to show up every weekend. You have to win each game however that game has to be won, whether that's 40-45 or 10-3.

Q: But given that inconsistency, what you see this weekend, 'we know this team's great. Now they can play well'. Vice versa. Your offense just has not scored enough points, that seems to be a consistent thing. It's not like you guys scored 40 one game and then 10 the next. If you could just give me one or two things besides the buzzwords about execution or consistency that you have confidence that this team will score more points, in these last 13 games…

DARIUS SLAYTON: I would say the fact that we have, for instance, the Dallas game, I don't know if you remember way back early, like the mid-2000s, Alabama and LSU played the national championship game and it was like the worst offensive game ever because neither team got past the 50. That's not us. If that was the case, then that would be, 'we're in Hell. We can't get anything going. We can't move the ball.' We got into scoring position multiple times against Dallas. We scored I think on every drive in the first half, and then in the second half, we got into scoring position other times. If it wasn't for a penalty here or there, or better execution by us here or there, we would have been in scoring position some more. That tells you that we're getting into the scoring position and now you just have to finish from there. The encouraging part of that is that we are getting down there. If you're not getting down there then you don't have a chance in the first place. I would say that going forward is what we will try to hang our hat on is, 'All right, we have done a good job of getting there and now we have to finish when we get there.'

Q: You've been on offenses that haven't got there. You know what I mean?

DARIUS SLAYTON: Exactly. Yeah, I definitely have. So, I know the difference.

Q: You said you watched some TV yesterday and what seems to be the common theme is that there are some teams show up some days, and then hey don't show up the next day. When you're sitting at 1-3, do you sit there and go, 'We're really not that far out of it?'

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, it's a long year. I mean four games is, like you said earlier, a quarter of the year. Got a lot more football to play and ultimately, if we play better going forward, we'll get different results, and you'll look up and we'll be where we want to be.

Q: Do you sit back and look at the Washington game and scratch your head and go, 'How are they 3-1 and we should have beat them?'

DARIUS SLAYTON: If you look at that game specifically, they didn't score any touchdowns. They won with all field goals. And they found a way to beat us that day. That's why I said, it's the NFL. It's not always going to be you get in the end zone three or four times. You would love for it to be that way, but you have to find a way to, like I said, win each game the way that game needs to be won.

Q: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of having the time off from a Thursday game to a Sunday game, because just as an example, the Jets came out yesterday and were completely out of sync after looking really good the previous week. What's the advantages of the extra rest versus staying sharp?

DARIUS SLAYTON: I think the advantage is that it gives your body time to recover. Obviously playing that Sunday-Thursday back-to-back is a very short window to play football in, so it's nice to have the time for your body to recover. I think it's important to stay, if not fully physically locked in, mentally locked in, whether that be…I wouldn't say that it's the time to go to Miami and kick your feet up on the sand. It helps to get treatment or watch extra film or stretch, do Pilates, whatever it is you like to do to keep your body right in this time to try to keep yourself mentally into it, keep your body into it, but not fully relax.

Q: You guys have been to Seattle in recent years, and it hasn't been a good trip for you guys. What is it that's difficult about playing there and what are your memories?

DARIUS SLAYTON: We're 1-1 there, aren't we? Since I've been here…we beat them that 6-10 year, then we lost the last time we went there.

Q: Yeah, I guess it was last time I'm looking at. Is it a difficult place to play?

DARIUS SLAYTON: For sure. I mean the 12s are well-known. They're well-documented. It's a loud place to play. They have a good football team. They've been a good football team for it feels like, the last two decades, so they're always competitive. We know it's going to be a tough challenge, but we're going to work to go out there and get a win.

Q: No crowd that first time when you guys went out there. There was no crowd in the stands.

DARIUS SLAYTON: Yeah, you're right. That was the COVID year.

Q: In terms of Seattle, you talked about watching games over the weekend. They're obviously playing tonight, but when you're watching a game like that, and because this has become such a week-to-week league, can you fall into a trap of watching that one game tonight and forming opinions off of a team, or have you gotten to the point where, you know how to assess a team over a larger period of time rather than looking at them, 'Well, this is what they did the last game, so we're going to anticipate, this versus maybe a bigger picture?'

DARIUS SLAYTON: For sure, because there's also matchups involved in this where certain teams maybe match up better with a team or match up differently with the team than you do. Obviously tonight it kind of helps, you get a little precursor I guess, to be able to watch a full game of them. And for me as a receiver, I get to watch their DBs up against Detroit's, (they've) got (Lions wide receiver) Amon-Ra (St. Brown), one of the better receivers in the league, (Lions wide receiver) Kalif Raymond, they got some other good wideouts. I'll get a chance to see them go up against those guys and more so get a feel for how they play and the way they look. Whether they win or lose, ultimately, is irrelevant, but for me, I try to take more away from like, how do they play, their style of play, those types of things.

Offensive Tackle Jermaine Eluemunor

Q: Heading out to a place that's known for being loud, one of the loudest buildings in the league. I'm curious for you guys, from your perspective, is that talked about as a (offensive) line right off the bat this week, knowing what's installed, maybe more silent counts, kind of getting that together? I know you're probably working on that every week, but the idea is it's a big difference when you go to a place like that, I would think.

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: Yeah, typically away games you are dependent on silent count. I don't think there's ever been an away game in my career, unless you're up big in the fourth quarter, that you don't use silent count for an away game. It's something that you're used to. Luckily, we had two games straight going silent count so we're more adjusted to it now.

Q: Did you spend a lot of time this weekend watching football, watching NFL games?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: Yeah. Saturday, I got to hang out with the family a lot, so I didn't really watch college football and then yesterday, it was raining too much so we just chilled inside, watching a couple of games just to see what other teams are doing and just watch other people play.

Q: Is it helpful to you to watch these games and, every team is different, and just think, 'Okay, they're doing this. Maybe I can find something here that can maybe help me or help our team.'?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: No, I don't think you can try to make judgments off of other teams like that. I think that you just got to figure out what you need to do better as a team and as a person and as a player and go from there. You can't watch other teams and try to pick up little things that they're doing that you can do also because their team is completely different to how our team is built. No team in the NFL is built like the Giants. No team is built like the (Detroit) Lions, the Seattle Seahawks. They're all built differently to fulfill the needs that they want and obviously need and how they want to play in their style of playing, things like that.

Q: I think your answer to this is going to be yes. So, if it is, I want to know why. Do you think your offense is close to scoring a lot more points?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: Yeah, for sure. If you watch our games, we've moved the ball in every single game. Obviously, the (Minnesota) Vikings game we could have moved it a little bit better, but we were still moving the ball in that game. If you watch the Vikings now, a lot of teams struggle against that defense. I feel like we played a pretty good game against them, just weren't clean enough and didn't execute enough. But then you watch the other three games, we've moved the ball up and down the field on all three of those teams and all three of those teams have really good defenses. So, I think that we're really close and I think that we'll see that this week.

Q: Just a question about having that mini bye week, the extra time. What are the advantages and disadvantages of that in terms of obviously getting your body right and getting the rest, but also staying sharp? Just as an example, the Jets were coming off their best week of the year on a Thursday night and came out on Sunday with the extra time, and in this particular example, were not sharp at all. I'm curious what your take is on that.

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: I think the biggest thing is it gives you time to self-reflect and see the things that you're doing better than other teams and things that you're not doing better than other teams. It gives you an opportunity to really dive into things you can do better and things you need to work on. A lot of times getting a little break like that can be good for teams that really need to hone in on certain things and really need to get better in certain areas of their team. So, I can't speak on how that went for the Jets, but I definitely think that will be beneficial for us. It will help us really dive into those little things and get that corrected for Seattle.

Q: One of the things coming into the Dallas game that everybody was pointing to Dallas was that they were struggling stopping the run. What did they do differently that prevented you from running or what didn't you do to run?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: I think we just didn't execute as an offensive line how we needed to, like we did in the last two games. It was just little things where guys took turns not doing the right thing. Like me, there was two, three plays I could have done a better job on. And I'm sure there's other guys that feel the same way. Dallas, they have a pretty good defense. They're really fast at the ball and they have a bunch of young guys that are pretty good. But I think it was more so what we did more than what it was that they did and so we'll improve those things this week and be ready for Seattle.

Q: Your line has gotten a lot of help from the tight ends this year. Do you feel that you're now at the point where maybe you can free them up to go out more, give (quarterback) Daniel (Jones) some more options?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: Do you mean in the run game or the pass game?

Q: Pass game…

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: They haven't really chipped that much this year, if I'm being honest with you. It's more so they've been in the run game. But pass game has really just been really five on five and running backs picking up blitzers.

Q: The analytics sites grade the Giants as a very high pass blocking offensive line and not so well in the run game. I know (tackle) Andrew Thomas always talks about, 'The run game is where an offensive line can make a difference.' Is that something that is a fair assessment? Are you guys excelling in pass protection and need to get better in run blocking?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: Obviously. I think that pass blocking, we're doing our jobs and in run blocking we need to do a lot better. So, we're working on that this week.

Q: Pass protection here has been an issue for a long, long, long, long, long time. Why do you think that this group has come together so quickly when it's not a group that has years of chemistry together? Why do you think pass protection has come together?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: I think everyone on the o-line just cares and it's a veteran group. (Tackle) AT (Andrew Thomas) has been the league for six years now, (guard Jon) Runyan (Jr.) is going on five, (center John Michael) Schmitz (Jr.) is going on two, but he's an older guy so he's more experienced and he's more intelligent than a lot of younger guys in the same class as him. Then GV, (guard Greg Van Roten) has been in the league for a while, he's 34 years old and he's real smart and intelligent. And obviously, I have a lot of experience also. Experience can play a key factor in that but, also, we just really care about keeping (quarterback) Daniel (Jones) upright. We know the cleaner we keep him, the more confident he's going to be in the pocket and the more he'll be able to do what we know he can do. He'll be able to trust us more. We know that's a big thing for him, creating that trust with him and giving him the time he needs. When it comes to the run game, we just need to execute better and hone in on the little things and be better mentally.

Q: I was just hoping you could expand on that. That was what I was going to ask is. There obviously has to be a trust there. Do you feel like that's gained as the last couple of weeks went on? And is that why he seems to be playing a little bit better than Week 1 when you guys were all new to each other?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: I think the one thing people don't look at is Week 1, that was his first game coming off a huge injury. I don't think people look at that. Last year, obviously I can't speak on that because I wasn't here, but things may not have went how he wanted to. He obviously was taking more hits than he would have liked. This year, we know that we have to keep him clean and keep him upright. Which is true with every single quarterback in the NFL, if you keep them clean and you keep them upright then they're going to be able to do their job and execute and play the ball that they like to play and do their job and ball out. So, we know that with DJ (Daniel Jones), if we keep him clean then that will help grow his confidence and his trust in us that he can stand in the pocket and go through his reads and deliver the ball and keep doing his thing. If you watch the last three weeks, he's really been doing his thing. That's because he's starting to trust us more and more. That means a lot for us because we're going out there and doing everything we can to keep him clean. So, we're going to keep doing that, keep building his trust in us and keep building his confidence.

Q: You brought up the experience of the offensive line. I'm curious how different the situation is when you have a line that has experience. I know (center) John Michael (Schmitz Jr.) is maybe not the most experienced in the middle, but the other four guys are veterans. How much different does that make the situation when you have so much experience on your line?

JERMAINE ELUEMUNOR: I think that offensive line is one of those positions in the NFL where it's like wine. It's better over age instead of drinking the wine that's just made, if you have one that's aged a lot then that tends to taste better. That's kind of like offensive line where being a young guy in the NFL on the offensive line is hard because the speed is different, the techniques are different and then also the defensive ends and the defensive tackles, they're a lot faster than in college. They're a lot more technical and they're a lot smarter. That's why you sometimes see the younger guys struggle a lot because they're not used to what they're going against. In the NFL, the older you are on the offensive line, like I said, it can be beneficial for you because you're used to going against certain guys and you're used to the speed of the game. Bullets flying all over the place, all the plays that you got to know, knowing what the defensive line is going to do in front of you, how their positioning is going to affect how you're going to run the ball or throw the ball and little aspects like that. I think that the more you see certain defenses and certain players, the better it can be for you. So, that's why it's good for (John Michael) Schmitz (Jr.) because he's around (Jon) Runyan (Jr.) and GVR (Greg Van Roten) and they're really experienced. Then me and AT (Andrew Thomas) can just help him as well. But that's why I feel like we're having some success this year on the offensive line because we've all been around a lot of different offenses, and we've been in the league for a while now. Obviously, it can be better in the run game, which it will be.