Giants won’t have to pick side with Paulson Adebo as top cornerback

When the Saints drafted Paulson Adebo in 2021, he didn’t need to instantly become their top cornerback. That title, and those responsibilities, belonged to Marshon Lattimore — who’d already made three Pro Bowls in his first four seasons, won Defensive Rookie of the Year and had established himself as one of the premier corners in the league.

Instead, over the next four years, New Orleans kept Adebo mostly on the left side and Lattimore on the right.

“It wasn’t necessarily a preference thing or me kind of choosing it,” Adebo recalled Thursday, but rather just the result of their luxury.

In his first four NFL seasons, Adebo logged 94.4 percent of his wide cornerback snaps on the left, according to Pro Football Focus.

Even dating back to his college seasons at Stanford, Adebo — with the exception of the limited occasions when the Cardinal played a big receiver — stuck to one side, too, he said.

But the Giants, at least for now, don’t have a top-flight cornerback to play alongside Adebo.

When he inked a three-year, $54 million deal in free agency, Adebo instantly became their No. 1 option. He’s the one who has navigated training camp without being involved in a competition. The one who has avoided the spotlight set on Deonte Banks, on Cor’Dale Flott and on Big Blue’s lack of proven cornerback depth.

The one who has instead inherited plenty of pressure to perform from the start.

And if the Giants end up wanting Adebo to shadow receivers, something he noticeably did at times in a matchup with Garrett Wilson during a joint practice with the Jets, he’d be open to that change.

“It was just kind of how things shook out,” Adebo said of playing on the left side in New Orleans. “So definitely, I feel like I could play on both sides, and so it’s not something that I focus too much on.”

There are advantages to having Adebo shadow receivers. It would avoid allowing opponents the chance to constantly match their top wideouts against the Giants’ second cornerback, which will be their weaker spot.

It prevents Adebo from being stuck with the wideouts on his side of the field and instead dictates who he’ll be tasked with containing.

Defensive coordinator Shane Bowen’s strategy might not become clear until the early weeks of the regular season — the Giants could face Terry McLaurin (in a contract standoff with the Commanders) and the Cowboys’ CeeDee Lamb in Weeks 1 and 2 — but if Adebo has become the Giants’ Lattimore, they don’t have someone else to trust in that opposite spot like the Saints once did.

“How we deploy guys, what we decide to do, I think [Adebo’s] comfortable with whatever we ask him to do,” head coach Brian Daboll said. “I think he’s got a good skill set to play the corner position, and then, again, every week we’ll decide what we want to do and how we want to do it.”

Adebo played in just seven games last year before breaking his femur, but he produced 43 passes defended with 10 interceptions across 52 games with the Saints.

He leveraged those numbers into a deal with a Giants defense desperately craving turnovers — it’s something they’ve been “focusing on” in training camp, Adebo said — after managing just five interceptions in 2024.

Adebo has tried to maximize matchups with Giants star Malik Nabers to help him improve, too, while also passing along insight to Banks.

His role has already been solidified, even if the underlying details — for now — still remain unclear.

“Obviously, there are guys who are very skilled, and maybe they can do certain things better than other receivers,” Adebo said. “But your approach to the game, as far as knowing that this is gonna be your assignment, this is what you have to do, I don’t think it changes too much.”