Nuñez-Roches had quiet first season in New Jersey
If you feel veteran defensive tackle Rakeem Nuñez-Roches did not have the impact in 2023 the New York Giants hoped for when they gave him a three-year, $12 million free agent contract with $5.465 million guaranteed, you would be right.
Nuñez-Roches had a quiet year for the Giants, statistically one of the poorest of his nine NFL seasons.
Can Nuñez-Roches rebound? Or, is a fading who will end up looking like money poorly spent by Giants GM Joe Schoen? Let’s discuss as we continue player-by-player profiles of the Giants’ 90-man roster.
The skinny
Height: 6-foot-2
Weight: 305
Opening day age: 31
Position: Defensive tackle
Experience: 9
Contract: Year 2 of three-year, $12 million deal | 2024 cap hit: $4,333,333 | Fully guaranteed: $5.465 million ($2 million of $2.865 million base salary guaranteed)
Career to date
To improve sub-standard depth on their defensive line in 2022, the Giants signed Nuñez-Roches to a three-year deal. Nuñez-Roches and A’Shawn Robinson were supposed to be depth pieces but played more than anticipated after Leonard Williams was sent to the Seattle Seahawks at the NFL trade deadline.
Nuñez-Roches started four of the 16 games he played, getting 462 defensive snaps (44%). He had 26 tackles, the second-highest single-season total of his career, but his ancillary numbers weren’t good.
Nuñez-Roches’ 46.3 overall Pro Football Focus grade was the second-lowest of his career. His 43.9 run defense score was a career-worst. So was his 34.9 tackling grade, a result of missing 18.2% of tackle attempts, per PFF.
Nuñez-Roches was a sixth-round pick by the Kansas City Chiefs in 2015. He spent three seasons with the Chiefs, then five with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before joining the Giants.
2024 outlook
Williams is, of course, gone. Robinson, who signed with the Carolina Panthers in free agency, is also gone. The Giants did not draft any defensive linemen and signed only veteran Jordan Phillips in free agency.
The Giants, frankly, need Nuñez-Roches to play well in 2024.
Could the change in defensive coordinators from Wink Martindale to Shane Bowen help Nuñez-Roches? Perhaps.
Martindale aligned Nuñez-Roches differently than the Buccaneers had in the three previous seasons.
From 2020-2022 in Tampa Bay, Nuñez-Roches played 1,630 defensive snaps. Per PFF, his alignments broke down this way:
- A Gap: 502 snaps (30.8%)
- B Gap: 974 snaps (59.8%)
- Over Tackle: 154 snaps (9.4%)
Here is how Nuñez-Roches aligned for the Giants in 2023:
- A Gap: 66 snaps (14.3%)
- B Gap: 313 snaps (67.8%)
- Over Tackle: A career-most 80 snaps (17.4%)
That is not the usage pattern he had in Tampa Bay — one that led the Giants to give him $5.465 million guaranteed on a three-year, $12 million contract.
Part of that, of course, was due to the Giants’ commitment to Dexter Lawrence at nose tackle. Still, the 6-foot-2, 305-pound Nuñez-Roches’ was asked to play farther away from the ball on a more consistent basis. Perhaps, and this is only speculation, that was part of the reason for the missed tackles and overall lack of impact as a run defender.
It will be interesting to see if Nuñez-Roches’ usage and production change with Bowen designing the defense.
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