Evan Neal has played 16 of the Giants’ last 51 games, and the number finally caught up to him on cutdown day.
New York released its 2022 first-round tackle this week, and the injury log tells most of the story. He started 13 of 17 games as a rookie before a knee injury ended that season early. In 2023, what the team first called an ankle sprain turned out to be a fracture once his rehab stalled, and he landed on injured reserve on Christmas Eve after playing only seven games. He came back for nine games in 2024, then missed all of 2025 with a hamstring injury after a position switch to guard.
Sixteen played out of fifty-one possible. That’s a body that stopped cooperating with the plan the Giants built around it back in 2022.
The same math has Neal finishing his four seasons with a 48.3 overall PFF grade, a 41.0 mark in pass protection, and 27 total starts. Giants fans remember him best for a seven-sack afternoon with Daniel Jones getting hit behind him against Seattle, which is a rough way to be remembered when you were drafted to fix that exact problem.
The part that actually matters happened this offseason, not on Alabama tape from 2022. When John Harbaugh’s staff moved Neal to guard and called it a fresh start, he had every reason to stay there if he’d shown anything in camp. Instead, rookie first-round pick Francis Mauigoa beat him out, and so did two backup-caliber veterans in Lucas Patrick and Aaron Stinnie.
Harbaugh’s front office looked at a former top-ten pick and decided a rookie and two camp bodies gave the team a better chance to win football games. Nobody hands out a second guard competition to a player they believe in.
I still have Neal’s draft profile bookmarked from 2022, the one with three different analysts comparing him to Trent Williams. It’s aged the way most of those comparisons do.
The 2022 class is down to two players now: Kayvon Thibodeaux and Micah McFadden. Wan’Dale Robinson and Cor’Dale Flott left in free agency for Tennessee. Joshua Ezeudu got traded to Kansas City. Neal was supposed to be the headline name in that class, the pick a rebuilding front office would point to years later as proof it turned things around.
Instead he’s proof it didn’t.
Pardon My Take had the funniest read on where this goes next:
https://twitter.com/PardonMyTake/status/2094184511588159815
Willowbrook Mall security should be on alert. But the joke works because it’s true — Neal is now just a guy walking around New Jersey, unemployed, with the receipts on exactly how a top-ten pick turns into nothing.
Cutting Neal wasn’t just cutting a bust. It was erasing the last real evidence the 2022 class ever missed this badly.
His comps read Trent Williams. His body read waiver wire.
