The New York Giants continue to tinker with their roster by adding players from winning cultures.
The Giants signed defensive tackle Marlon Tuipulotu to a reserve-futures deal Tuesday after he completed the 2025 NFL season with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Tuipulotu is the brother of Los Angeles Chargers EDGE rusher Tuli Tuipulotu and was a part of the Chiefs in 2024 and rival Philadelphia Eagles for his first three NFL seasons.
Tuipulotu was a sixth-round pick of the Eagles in the 2021 NFL Draft from USC. The 26-year-old has three sacks in 33 career games with the Chiefs and Eagles but has dressed for only one playoff game in his NFL career.
Marlon Tuipulotu Is A Big, Run-Stuffing Defensive Lineman
The Giants have been linked to interior defensive linemen like Peter Woods of Clemson with the No. 5 overall pick. They may still end up choosing him, but taking a flier on a 6-2, 307-pounder like Tuipulotu is a better play.
Tuipulotu only played 17 defensive snaps for the Chiefs in 2025, down from 61 in 2024 and a career high of 232 with the NFC champion Eagles in 2022. He spent the bulk of the year on the Kansas City practice squad but did play three games, accounting for one tackle.
Even though he did not accrue enough snaps to rank on Pro-Football Focus’ list of interior linemen, Tuipulotu earned just a 38.6 grade from the site this year.
Still, adding a player like Tuipulotu could be beneficial to the Giants since they are looking for depth for superstar defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence.
New York already has spent a ton of draft capital on its D-line. It selected both Abdul Carter and Kayvon Thibodeaux with top-5 picks over the past four years and offloaded three draft picks to acquire Brian Burns from the Carolina Panthers before the 2024 season.
With that quartet in place, and the Giants also sporting the 17th-ranked offense in points per game (22.4) despite putting up the 13th-most yards per game this year (333.5), they cannot realistically exhaust another draft pick on a defensive lineman until at least the third day of the draft.
What Are NFL Reserve-Futures Deals?
You might have seen a slew of teams sign players to these reserve-futures contracts Tuesday.
Each club is eligible to sign players that are either not on another team’s active roster or when their contract expires while sitting on the practice squad.
When teams sign practice-squad players with expired contracts before the league calendar rolls in March, they can do so by enacting reserve-futures deals that do not count against the salary cap or 53-man roster totals.
In Tuipulotu’s case, he was on Kansas City’s practice squad all season, but his contract was not renewed Monday. The Giants saw him available and scooped him up, likely for the league-veteran minimum salary of $1.17 million — though, again, Tuipuloutu’s money will not count against the 2026 salary cap.
Likewise, the Giants lost wide receiver Ihmir Smith-Marsette to a reserve-futures contract, since the Arizona Cardinals claimed him Tuesday. Smith-Marsette, who was on the Giants practice squad all season, did not suit up for a game in 2025.
Giants Sign Former Eagles, Chiefs Defensive Tackle