v
eteran offensive lineman and former New York Giants draft pick Bobby Hart has signed a new contract with the Buffalo Bills, the team announced on Monday.
Hart, 27, was originally selected in the seventh round of the 2015 NFL Draft, making him a selection of former Giants general manager Jerry Reese. The Florida State product spent his first three NFL seasons with the Giants and has primarily played right tackle throughout his professional career.
Hart appeared in nine games for the Giants as a rookie, then became the team’s full-time starter at right tackle in 2016. Although the Giants finished 11-5 and made the playoffs that season, Hart was often identified as the weak point of New York’s offense and was ultimately benched for the team’s playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers.
At the outset of the following season, Hart proclaimed that he was “the best right tackle in the league,” per Dan Duggan of NJ Advance Media (via Yahoo!). That statement turned out to be not true, as the Giants ended up waiving Hart before the end of the season.
Hart landed with the Cincinnati Bengals during the 2018 offseason and became a mainstay along their offensive line, starting 45 of the 46 games in which he appeared from 2018-2020. In 2019, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Bengals even signed him to a three-year, $21+ million contract extension.
The Bengals ultimately released Hart before he could play out the full terms of that deal. He spent most of the 2021 season bouncing around different rosters/practice squads, spending time with the Bills, Miami Dolphins and Tennessee Titans.
Although Hart only played one game with the Bills last season, Buffalo decided to bring him back on a one-year deal.
Hart Was Accused of Quitting on the Giants
Hart’s final season with the Giants was a tumultuous one. His character was called into question when the New York Post reported on a locker room incident involving Hart and defensive tackle Damon Harrison. According to the report, Harrison was so fed up with Hart that “the two almost came to blows” and Harrison had to be restrained.
The decision to waive Hart in December of 2017 came one day after Dave Gettleman was introduced as the team’s new general manager. Former Giants offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz, who shared a locker room with Hart in 2015, praised the move on Twitter.
“Gettleman isn’t playing,” Schwartz wrote. “Clearing out locker room cancers.”
This led to a full-blown Twitter spat between Schwartz and Hart, with Hart accusing Schwartz of doing the same thing he did.
“Schwartz you quit on the team my rookie year after you secured your guaranteed money bro,” Hart wrote in a since-deleted Tweet. “Maybe I learned shutting down from you lol.”
Although Hart deleted his tweet, Schwartz posted a screenshot of Hart’s retort and defended himself against the accusation that he quit on the team in 2015.
Gettleman’s early house-cleaning efforts were praised at the time, but less than five years later, Gettleman is unemployed and Hart still has a job in the NFL.
Giants O-Line Situation Remains Unsettled
Hart’s recent contract extension with the Bills draws attention to the Giants’ struggles along the offensive line. Hart obviously was not the answer to New York’s problems at right tackle, but the solution still hasn’t been discovered. Over the past four seasons, the team has cycled through the likes of Chad Wheeler, Mike Remmers, Cameron Fleming and Nate Solder at the position — none of whom were much better than Hart.
Under new general manager Joe Schoen and new head coach Brian Daboll, the Giants have made some promising changes to the offensive line. With Andrew Thomas blossoming into a quite talented left tackle, the focus has been on the interior, where they’ve added center Jon Feliciano and guards Max Garcia and Mark Glowinski in free agency.
The biggest question mark that still remains along the offensive line is right tackle. Matt Peart, a third-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, is penciled in as the projected starter at the position, but he struggled to wrestle the starting job away from Solder last season. Solder, by the way, is now a free agent and seems unlikely to return to the Giants at this point.
Schoen and Daboll, who were with the Bills when they brought in Hart last season, must come up with a solution to solidify that right tackle position — and the offensive line as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment