Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers offered some real-time reactions to the team's first-round picks on Thursday night and they led to a conversation with head coach John Harbaugh.
Nabers appeared on a Bleacher Report livestream with Packers edge rusher Micah Parsons and said he loved fifth overall pick Arvell Reese as a player but wondered "where does he play" on a team that already has Brian Burns, Abdul Carter and Kayvon Thibodeaux on the edge. The Giants took offensive lineman Francis Mauigoa with the 10th pick and the Cowboys traded up to take safety Caleb Downs one pick later.
“I’d rather get him than play against him," Nabers said of Downs.
On Saturday, Harbaugh said he had a "great conversation" with Nabers and that the wide receiver was "fired up and happy" about the team's moves. He also said he welcomed the conversation about Reese because he knows that Nabers isn't going to be the only one with questions about how the Giants plan to fit him into their defense.
"It's like he said, I was curious about how you were going to use him," Harbaugh said, via a transcript from the team. "I showed him how we're going to use him. He is fired up about it. I appreciate it. You know, one thing that you'll kind of probably see as we go here, we don't get too worried about stuff. You know, as long as a person's heart is in the right place, as long as the person really cares, a player, a coach, or anybody, you really want what's best for everybody, you're coming from -- he has a good heart and a good place, you know, say what you think. Put it out there. We talk all the time about confronting everything that has to do with our football. So Malik wants to know how we're going to use our first round pick, I want to show him. I want to explain it to him. The fact that he says it publicly, who cares? I know fans are probably thinking the same thing. It was the same question that everybody is going to have, and we knew that, because we knew how kind of Arvell was perceived."
The Giants will see Downs twice a year as long as he's in Dallas and that may not put a smile on Nabers's face, but it will be easier to deal with any disappointment if Reese and Mauigoa blossom into the kind of players the Giants believe they can be.