As recently as Monday, at least one report indicated that the New York Giants would consider making Ohio State Buckeyes linebacker Sonny Styles the fifth overall pick of the 2026 NFL Draft this Thursday night.
ESPN’s Kevin Clark believes Styles will be viewed as the best overall player from this draft class a few years down the road. However, it sounds like the Giants will be going in a different direction.
Have the Giants made a final Sonny Styles decision?
During an appearance on the latest edition of “The Ryen Russillo Show,” NFL Network draft analyst and insider Daniel Jeremiah addressed the chatter linking Styles with the Giants.
“I was told [the Giants] were not going to take Styles,” Jeremiah revealed, per Darryl Slater of NJ Advance Media. “I was told that was not their guy. So that came from a couple of different places.”
According to Jarrett Prendergast of Pro Football Network, NFL insider Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated suggested earlier in April that Giants head coach John Harbaugh could view Styles as a “kind of battleship commander” for the Big Blue defense. Breer made those comments before the Giants traded longtime defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence II to the Cincinnati Bengals for the 10th overall pick in this year’s draft. It appears Styles may now be off the Giants’ radar.
If not Sonny Styles, who for the Giants at pick No. 5?
For a mock draft posted on Tuesday, Giants and NFL reporter Connor Hughes of SNY predicted that New York will select Ohio State safety Caleb Downs with the draft’s fifth pick. After speaking with unnamed “coaches, executives and scouts from a variety of teams,” The Athletic’s Jeff Howe agrees that Downs will be the pick for the Giants at No. 5 if the club doesn’t trade down.
“They’re taking Downs,” one head coach told Hughes about the Giants’ intentions for the fifth pick.
“He’s a rock-solid person, teammate, leader,” an executive added about Downs while speaking with Howe. “He’s about as clean of a prospect as you’re going to get.”
For what it’s worth, neither Hughes nor Howe believes Styles will fall to the Giants at the 10th pick.