It’s the second week of training camp, and the Giants’ tight end competition remains wide open, as the quintet of Kellen Davis, Larry Donnell, Daniel Fells, Xavier Grimble, and Adrien Robinson compete for the starting job.
Tight ends coach Kevin M. Gilbride said Monday there is no clear-cut favorite to win the job, and the coaching staff is trying to give each candidate an equal chance.
“We’ve definitely made a concerted effort to get everybody with the first team, to get everybody the same amount of reps, to give everybody the same opportunities to do the different things that we’re asking the tight ends to do,” Gilbride said. “That’s been an effort to do that, in order to evaluate.”
The most proven of the candidates is Fells, who has 92 career receptions but was out of the league last season after being released by the Patriots at the end of training camp.
The only other candidate with more than three career receptions is Davis, who after starting his career with the Bears and spending last season with the Super Bowl champion Seahawks, has only 50 career catches.
Gilbride said he’s still waiting to see which tight end separates himself as a player who can both catch and block consistently.
“There have been guys that have made strides in different areas, so right now we’re looking for the complete tight end who can do it all,” he said.
As a group, the tight ends had a good day of practice on Monday.
Eli Manning found Fells for a touchdown in a goal-line drill, and Donnell, listed as the first-string tight end on the team’s depth chart, made an acrobatic catch to haul in a pass from Ryan Nassib.
“They’ve all worked hard, and they do make plays,” coach Tom Coughlin said. “Today, we had a couple of nice plays made. Not one [has stood out above the others], but I think there’s been some progress there.”
Understandably, with all five preseason games still to come, Gilbride said as of right now, there’s no timetable for determining a starter.
“I’m not going to give any type of a timeline because I don’t know the timeline,” he said. “All I know is that we need to continue to develop them.”
Whoever sees time at tight end for the Giants this season will be deployed in a variety of ways in offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo’s scheme.
“I would put it as ‘jack of all trades,’” Gilbride said when asked to characterize the tight end in McAdoo’s offense. “With having them be in the backfield and playing a lot of that fullback role, splitting them out as the number one receiver, the number two, also an in-line tight end as far as the blocking and the pass receiving. It’s a jack-of-all-trades, and they have to master them all.”