Brian Burns: Giants Linebacker Corps Will Bring ‘Organized Chaos’ for Offenses in 2026

Brian Burns has a warning for opposing offensive coordinators: good luck figuring out who’s coming.

The Giants pass rusher says New York’s retooled linebacker corps is built to confuse blockers before the ball is even snapped, and he’s not shy about crediting new defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson for the design. Burns broke it down on the team’s “Giants Huddle” podcast, and the comments were later picked up by NFL.com.

“It’s not going to be simple for an offense to read or understand exactly what we’re doing, and that’s the beauty in defense in my opinion,” Burns said. “And on top of that, you have world-class athletes at our size that can move around and do a lot of different things. I just feel like it’s going to be organized chaos.”

The size problem offenses can’t scout around

Here’s the trick: Burns, Tremaine Edmunds, Kayvon Thibodeaux, Abdul Carter and rookie Arvell Reese are all built almost identically. Same range of height. Same range of weight. Same frame off a game-tape freeze frame.

That’s the whole point. Defenses have long tipped their hand by size alone — offenses ID the smaller linebacker as the coverage guy and slide protection toward the bigger edge threats. When every player in the group looks the same before the snap, that shortcut disappears.

“Me, Tremaine, Arvell, KT and Abdul all look the same,” Burns said. “And we can all drop, all rush, so it’s just like you don’t really know who’s doing what.”

He tied it directly to protection math. “It’s just when you have those similar body types that can do it all, the offense doesn’t know who’s coming,” Burns said. “Like if you have a smaller guy or a guy that isn’t good at rushing or isn’t big enough to handle the trenches, they’ll normally ID him as the dropper and they’ll slide everybody else to the actual rushers. But when you have guys with size like Arvell and Edmunds, you don’t know.”

Fixing last year’s soft spot in the middle

The Giants’ front seven was never the issue in 2025. The middle of the defense was. New York used the offseason to address it directly, adding Edmunds and drafting Reese, a pair of 6-foot-4 inside linebackers who give the defense a rare blend of length and closing speed between the tackles.

“I have never seen that,” said Burns, a three-time Pro Bowler entering his eighth NFL season. “Yeah, these are going to be the biggest [inside] linebackers I’ve ever played with. … It does a ton [for the defense], honestly, and then they are two guys that can move sideline to sideline, great speed, closing speed, able to play in space, cover. So, it does a lot honestly because the run defense should be better with them because they’re able to take on these blocks that’s climbing up to them, as well as the versatility that we’re going to have with this defense as far as blitzing and getting to different fronts just because of the size that they are.”

That versatility matters beyond stopping the run. Bigger inside linebackers who can still cover ground let Wilson dial up more exotic blitz packages and shift fronts late without tipping the call, since the same personnel can execute multiple assignments.

The secondary, by contrast, still carries questions after a shaky 2025. If the front seven creates the disguise and pressure Burns is describing, it takes pressure off a defensive backfield that struggled to hold up on its own.

Burns coming off a career year

Individually, Burns has plenty to build on. His 16.5 sacks last season tied Jason Pierre-Paul’s 2011 mark for fourth-most in a single season by a Giants defender. His 31 quarterback hits were the most by any Giant since the league started tracking the stat in 2006.

Burns credited experience more than raw scheme for the jump. “I would just say I feel like my process was a little bit better and I allowed my experience to help me in certain ways that I didn’t before,” he said, pointing to how he used play calls and simulated pressures to set up rushes on third down.

Why the Wilson factor matters

None of this works without buy-in on the calls themselves, and Burns singled out Wilson’s clarity as the piece that ties it together.

“I think Dennard does a great job of explaining what he wants and why he wants something,” Burns said. “That makes the picture a lot clearer. … I like how intentional he is. He gets exactly what he wants, what he’s looking for, out of the call. And like that he takes all the gray area out so there’s no confusion.”

That’s the coaching detail that turns a talented but disguised front into something offenses actually can’t solve on the fly — everyone executing the same assignment with zero hesitation, because there’s no ambiguity in what the call demands.

Training camp will be the first real test of whether the disguise translates from a podcast description to game-planning nightmare. But on paper, New York has built exactly what Burns is describing: a linebacker room where the eye test tells offenses nothing useful at all.