Giants’ Jerome Henderson wants players who thrive on an island

The New York Giants defense will take on a new look in 2024 with Shane Bowen taking over as coordinator for Wink Martindale.

Upon his hiring, Bowen and head coach Brian Daboll were quick to retain defensive backs coach Jerome Henderson and gave him the added responsibility of defensive passing game coordinator.

Henderson has been around the block a few times and understands how to deal with change. Bowen will initiate a completely different approach than Martindale and Henderson is waiting to see how things pan out, but is liking what he’s seeing thus far.

“You always wonder,” Henderson said in a recent interview on Giants.com.

“Shane has been awesome. He’s been a great leader so far. He’s done a good job getting our staff together and giving us his vision of our defense. He’s a guy who has listened to our input and asked for input and said, ‘This is going to be our defense and we’re going to build it the right way.’ It’s been a lot of fun so far.”

Henderson is returning but two of his top players — safety Xavier McKinney and cornerback Adoree’ Jackson — are not, although Jackson could still re-sign with the team.

“There are not a lot of new things in football,” Henderson said when asked what the secondary will look like this year. “It’s just we call them different things. It’s similar concepts, different language, little tweaks. It’s a little bit of, from the high-level perspective, just a different philosophy of how we’ll play defense. But at the end of the day, we’ll play similar coverages, we’ll have similar fronts, we’ll just hopefully play them at a higher level obviously this year and make the Giants fans proud.”

The Giants have a group of young cornerbacks led by Deonte Banks, Cor’Dale Flott, Nick McCloud, and Tre Hawkins III and could bring in a few more this spring in the draft.

Henderson, who once had Hall of Famer Darrelle Revis under his charge, explained what a ‘high-caliber’ cornerback looks like in his eyes.

“Obviously the movement skills are key for us, the ability to change directions and be explosive,” he said. “I think one of the things that’s overlooked, though, when you talk about Revis — he had this in spades — it’s that demeanor that ‘I want to dominate and control this guy across from me.’

“When I think about the really good ones, they wanted those big moments, and they wanted to be on that island. They wanted to know that I’m guarding the guy, and they wanted the ball to be thrown at that guy. The good ones did it at a high level and won a lot more of those battles than they lost.”

Banks seems to have that in him but the Giants will need a lot more than that.