No. 7 overall in 2022, gone on cutdown day
Twenty-nine games. That is the entire New York return on the seventh pick of the 2022 draft. The Giants released Evan Neal on Sunday, according to multiple US reports, on the day all 32 clubs had to get down to 53 players. He was competing for a backup job on the offensive line and lost it.
Neal is 25. Of those 29 regular-season appearances, 27 were starts, every one of them at right tackle. He also started both playoff games as a rookie.
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Size was never the problem
Two metres tall, roughly 154 kilos, an All-American at Alabama who had already played left guard, right tackle and left tackle before he turned pro. Only Ikem Ekwonu went ahead of him among offensive linemen that year. On paper it was a safe pick.
The rookie season still stands as his best work: 13 starts at right tackle. Then things thinned out fast. Sixteen games across the following two seasons, 14 starts. Ahead of 2025 the Giants slid him inside to right guard, the usual move for a tackle who keeps losing the edge to pass rushers.
It did not take. Neal never saw a regular-season snap in 2025 and went on injured reserve in November with a hamstring problem.
New York gave him one more year and got nothing back
He hit unrestricted free agency in March and re-signed with the Giants anyway. Same building, same coaches, no promise of playing time. Training camp settled it.
Someone will look at the tape from Tuscaloosa and the measurements and wonder whether a different room fixes him. Four seasons in, that is a bet on a body rather than a player.
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