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An amateur's review of Shane Lemieux's 0.0-graded pass-blocking reps from Week 15 against CLE


Shane Lemieux is a fairly polarizing player for Giants fans. I myself have alternately defended and criticized him as a player. Most of us here would agree that his run-blocking was at least only slightly below average and that he plays with a mean streak. What we can't agree on is can the dude pass block. Opinions range from "no and he never will be able to" all the way to "he's not great but as a rookie he'll get much better". I decided to watch the All-22 for every pass snap from Shane's week 15 performance against the Cleveland Browns. Why that game? Simply because it was later in the season so he had some time to develop AND because PFF gave him a 0.0 grade for his pass blocking efforts in that game. First, I'll give you my admittedly amateur conclusions about Shane as a player, and then I'll dive into the details.

My conclusion: I was wrong about Shane. He is a lot better as a pass-blocker than I thought. Given his improvement over the season, and the limited ways in which I watched him lose in the Cleveland game (which seem more technique related), I expect him to continue improving to the point where he could actually be a mid tier starting G in this league as soon as the end of the 2021 season. He is not as slow as I assumed. Some of the poor PFF grades he received over the season are likely well-deserved [his pass-blocking grades improved greatly over the season and he posted a 57 his last game of the season, which was his highest grade], but the 0.0 in the Cleveland game is not. It should have been in the 30-50 range, not 0.0.

I attempted to grade Shane's pass snaps as either a win or loss for most every 1-on-1, 2-on-2, or 3-on-3 pass rush situation that he faced in the Browns game in Week 15. I didn't look at double teams because NFL lineman are supposed to win double teams unless it's against Aaron Donald. There were a lot of snaps where he didn't have much to do because of how the Browns played defense on a particular snap. Shane spelled time with Hernandez this game and there weren't many drives because both teams ran the ball so much. That left me with just 8 "true" pass blocking snaps for Shane. He clearly won or clearly did not lose on 5 of them. If he gets his hands on you it's pretty much over. The dude is strong. He also was extremely quick at recognizing and adjusting to games being played by the defensive pass rushers, with one exception, which we'll get to. Here are the 3 snaps where he either clearly lost or one could say that he lost:

-1H Drive#1 3rd and 5 at CLE 8: Badly beaten 1-on-1 by Larry Ogunjobi. He seemed to guess wrong and then lose the hand-fight to try and knock Larry off-line. Shane is strong so if he gets a hand on you he can throw you off balance and recover, but he couldn't do that here. Larry just seemed to have a better plan at every step of the battle here. Therefore, I put this one down to technique, but you can watch the tape yourself on NFL.com and let me know what you think. A pretty definite loss, attributed to technique.

-2H Drive #1 1st and 10 at NYG 25 (9:54): It appears that he is badly beaten 1-on-1 by Sheldon Richardson. If you watch this snap in slow-mo you'll see Shane set waaaaay outside of Sheldon on the snap. Is this because it's an RPO and Shane is trying to prevent Sheldon from getting free in the throwing lane? Sheldon with the swim move to the QB but even then he only was able to pat McCoy on the back after the ball was already away. I'm just not sure about this one but someone familiar with blocking assignments on RPOs should take a look and let us all know. While it looks bad at first glance I don't think it's a loss. If it was a loss then isn't it just down to technique?

-Final Drive 1st and 10 at NYG 41: Total cluster for pretty much the entire line. It looked like Gates made the first mistake and then Lemieux compounded that by trying to play hero. Or, did Lemieux make the mistake by giving too much ground to start? I think the Browns ran a great game here. This is fixable, but is still an L.


In summary for the Cleveland game, Shane gets a 6/8 on "true" pass-blocking snaps. A 25% loss rate is certainly NOT good, but when we look at the two losses one was on a neat game that the Browns ran (against a rookie) and the other seems attributable to technique, which can certainly be improved.

Overall, eventhough it's just one game, this film review has significantly changed my opinion on Shane as a player. He is extremely quick at recognizing and adjusting to games being played by defensive rushers. His feet moved way faster than I expected. Dude is strong. Dude is nasty. You aren't getting through him. Some improvements in his technique when facing one-on-one rushers in space should shore up what I see as his only big weakness at this point. I worried that he was physically limited but I don't think that's true.

Anyway, I'd love it if someone with an OL background could pull up just those three snaps I highlighted and give me their opinion on them and everything else that I got wrong here!

Addendum: I watched the first four drives of the Giants in Week 17 against the Cowboys. Shane looked good! Cam Fleming on the other hand looked awful. He single-handedly killed one drive and cost us a chance at extending another. My #1 priority for the Giants is RT. Hopefully Peart is feeling better or we get someone in FA.

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