New York Giants: Evan Engram worth the first-round pick

New York Giants tight end Evan Engram was as good as advertised, if not better, during his rookie season, and his future appears to be bright.

Conventional wisdom says that the New York Giants reached in drafting tight end Evan Engram with the 23rd overall selection of the 2017 NFL Draft. Clubs locate stellar tight ends later in drafts all the time. Travis Kelce, Jason Witten, Zach Ertz, Delanie Walker, Antonio Gates and Rob Gronkowski are a handful of examples of talented tight ends who weren’t first-round picks. All worked out rather well for their teams.

What’s done is done. A new New York front office can’t put the genie back in the bottle and go back in time to take a different prospect in the first round of last year’s draft. Engram is essentially the final “gift” left by former general manager Jerry Reese, and Engram’s contributions to the offense during a lost season speak for themselves.

It’s easy to discount Engram’s numbers and the positive things he achieved during his debut year. Wide receivers Odell Beckham Jr. and Brandon Marshall were both lost to injuries in October. Sterling Shepard may not have been fully healthy for a single game between early August and Christmas. Because of these setbacks, Engram received a plethora of opportunities to build upon his statistics throughout the last 10 weeks of the season.

Per NFL.com, only five players at the position finished the regular season with more catches than Engram (64).  Six tight ends ended the campaign with more touchdowns than the first-year pro (6). Granted, the previously mentioned Kelce is the only tight end targeted more than Engram (115 times) in 2017, but that’s a reflection on the disastrous state of the club’s offense once it became infected by the injury bug.

It’s worth noting more than a few fans and observers lashed out at how Engram was used in the offense for the majority of the year, specifically the apparent lack of imagination as it pertained to routes he ran. Such criticisms are fair, but they mean little now that head coach Ben McAdoo didn’t retain his post through the holiday season. A different coach with a different scheme will need to work to get the most out of Engram in year two.

Yes, Engram struggled with drops, but one noteworthy night where he failed to reel-in multiple catchable passes during a game featured on national television created somewhat of a false narrative. Drops are not an official registered NFL stat, but NBC Sports credited Engram with five of them, an average of one per three starts (Engram missed the season finale because of injury). Seattle Seahawks tight end Jimmy Graham had seven drops. Kelce posted five.

Those suggesting Engram’s catch-to-targets ratio is concerning should remember the times quarterback Eli Manning missed the rookie on errant throws. Giants fans quickly became Manning defenders after McAdoo benched the two-time Super Bowl MVP in favor of Geno Smith in one of the strangest coaching decisions in recent memory, but nobody should pretend the 37-year-old played his best football this past fall. Manning deserves both credit for helping Engram develop and also criticism for failing to locate the tight end more often. Such miscues happen during games.

The main takeaway from Engram’s first season remains that he should be commended for how he responded to becoming the top option in the passing game. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, the Giants were featuring wide receivers Manning may not have recognized without seeing the names on the backs of their jerseys. This was never supposed to be the case despite Engram being a first-round pick. He was intended to be a piece to the puzzle rather than a superstar right out of the gates.

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Theoretically, any tight end taken with a first-round selection needs to become an All-Pro to be worth such a high value. That’s the nature of the position in the league these days. Engram isn’t there yet, but he has the goods to get to such a level playing alongside Beckham, Shepard and a third proven receiver when those products are healthy. As much as Reese got wrong, Engram looks like more of a hit than a miss heading into the offseason.