What can we expect from the Giants’ Day 1 and 2 draft picks as rookies?

Arvell Reese

Reese is at once the Giants’ most exciting draft pick and the one that’s most difficult to project. Few if any people expected him to be on the board when the Giants picked. Harbaugh himself said that in the “zillions” of mocks the Giants did, he was never there at No. 5. ESPN’s 2026 mock draft simulator isn’t quite that extreme, but the statistics of their own prediction model gave him a 4.5% chance of going to the Giants:

Francis Mauigoa

There was a decent chance that Mauigoa would drop to the Giants at No. 10, but the ESPN predictor had his highest odds of coming off the board at Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 9, with the Giants estimated at a 10% chance to be the pick at No. 10. Instead Spencer Fano was the first OL off the board at No. 9. The big uncertainty about Mauigoa is that he will be making the switch from right tackle to right guard as he enters the NFL. At Miami Mauigoa almost exclusively played right tackle, but he did get 10 snaps at right guard in his final season. Moving from tackle to guard is not considered as big an adjustment as is moving from one side of the offensive line to the other, but it does take getting used to. A recent example is Sam Cosmi of the Commanders, who played at right tackle his first two seasons and then moved to right guard for his most recent three. On the surface, the adjustment looks to have been pretty seamless for Cosmi:

• Mauigoa is not the cleanest offensive line prospect to come out of college in recent years. His totals are inflated because he had more college snaps than anyone else on the list, but per snap, you can see for example that he gave up more sacks than No. 9 pick Fano and many more than Penei Sewell and Joe Alt, perhaps the best offensive line prospects to come out of college in recent years.
• For almost all rookie offensive linemen, there’s a period of adjustment when they reach the NFL. Giants fans will remember rookie Andrew Thomas’s poor rookie play. Even Sewell took his lumps as a rookie, giving up five sacks and taking 11 penalties.
• You can only tell so much from college play. Evan Neal’s college stats were generally better than those of classmates Ikem Ekwonu and Charles Cross, and his rookie perfomance was not very different from theirs. It didn’t work out the same way in the pros, where every weakness is exploited. Brugler sees one of Mauigoa’s weaknesses as “ends up on the ground too much, especially when dropping eye level and lunging” which will revive nightmares of the Neal experience. On the other hand he sees Mauigoa’s foot speed as good for a guard. The bottom line: Don’t expect Mauigoa to dominate right away, and consider it a pleasant surprise if he does, but in the long term, it’s reasonable to hope that he’ll become a solid, or maybe elite, addition to the Giants’ offensive line.

Colton Hood

Let’s assume for the moment that Paulson Adebo is CB1 for the Giants, despite having had a nondescript first season in blue. CB2, however, is wide open. The Giants did sign Greg Newsome II, and Deonte Banks, like Newsome a late Round 1 draft pick, returns. Both players have had puzzling career paths. Newsome developed into a shutdown corner at Northwestern, giving up only 93 yards with 7 pass breakups and a 31.7 passer rating his final season. He carried that into the pros, with a sub-100 passer rating his first three seasons along with 6, 8, and 11 pass breakups and again a sub-100 passer rating. Then the wheels for some reason came off. Newsome has had some injuries, but nothing that kept him out of the lineup a significant amount of time. Whatever the reason, the past two years have not been good, and after acquiring him from the Browns, the Jaguars let him walk. In the 2026 draft, the Giants added a high Round 2 pick who was seen as a late Round 1 value in Colton Hood. Can one of these players grab hold of the CB2 job? Hood is another young guy (21) on an overall very young Giants team. Technically he has three seasons of college experience, but he hardly played his first year (44 snaps at Auburn). He spent a year at Colorado with Travis Hunter in the secondary, playing about half the time, and then he spent a year at Tennessee planning to be CB2 paired with Jermod McCoy until the latter’s injury forced Hood into the CB1 role. Hood was a sure tackler at Tennessee (6.6% missed tackle rate), surrendered only one TD with a 53.8% completion rate, had 5 pass breakups, and allowed only a 70.8 passer rating, playing almost exclusively on the boundary. There is every reason to think he could win the CB2 starting job as a rookie, and perhaps eventually become CB1. How often has that happened to low first/early second round picks, and how good were they? Below is a list of all cornerbacks drafted in the last 5 picks of Round 1 or the first five picks of Round 2 in the last five drafts. All of them are boundary rather than slot corners, as we expect Hood also to be:

Malachi Fields

Malachi Fields was the 10th wide receiver taken in the 2026 NFL Draft, and the second to come off the board in Round 3 after Antonio Williams (a 5-foot-11 wide receiver that the Giants probably wouldn’t have taken even if he was there). He was part of a mini-run on receivers in that round. No wide receivers had been taken at that point since Germie Bernard went at No. 47 in Round 2. An interesting thing about this part of this draft is the number of *big* WRs (6-2 or taller) that came off the board in the top half of Round 3, and how that compares to previous years. Here are just the big wide receivers: