NFL

Rolle ‘going out with a bang’ if it’s his last Giants season

Antrel Rolle does not want to go anywhere, but he’s a realist.

He’s seen many of his Giants teammates walk out the door the past few years, never to return. He’s entering the final year of his contract, and, while he hopes this isn’t his last go-round with the Giants, he knows it could be.

“If this happens to be my last year with the Giants, it will be my best season, so I’m gonna go out with a bang,” Rolle said Wednesday on SiriusXM’s NFL Radio. “But hopefully it’s not.”

Rolle, 31, believes he has four or five more quality seasons in him. Do the Giants agree? He will make $7 million this season and the Giants have not approached him with an offer for an extension, though Rolle has shown himself to be remarkably durable and one of their best defensive players, if not their best.

On Tuesday, when he met with reporters on the second day of offseason workouts, Rolle did not want to vault himself into a heightened position of leadership. With the other defensive captain, Justin Tuck, now with the Raiders, Rolle inherits solo ownership of the captaincy, but he did not state he would assume a larger leadership role.

“I just go out there and play ball,” Rolle said Tuesday. “I just know how to be Antrel. I don’t worry about wearing several different kind of hats. I just go out there and play ball. If I need to say something, it’s going to be said. If I need to do something, it’s going to be done. I just go out there and play ball. I think there should be 53 leaders in this locker room, not four or five or six. There’s going to be 53. Every man leads in their own way.”

A day later, Rolle changed his tune a bit.

“The way I look at the locker room, you know, these are my babies,” Rolle said on the radio. “These are my guys, these are my teammates, these are my brothers, these are the guys that I must protect at every given second that I’m there, that I’m with them on the field and off the field. As far as it being my locker room or my defense, I feel like I do hold a certain kind of title.”