The futures of New York Giants GM Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll was the major topic of the ‘Valentine’s Views’ podcast with Tony DelGenio and I did on Friday. In that show I said that I hoped the duo remained in their jobs with the Giants beyond this season.
So, now that I have said I would like to see them stay let me make the case for why I think they SHOULD stay.
I fully understand how embarrassing things have gotten. The Giants are 10-26-1 in regular season games since that magical 7-2 start in 2022, Schoen and Daboll’s first year in charge. They are 8-21 the last seasons.
They have a terrible defense with a coordinator who seems unable to get his players to understand and execute their assignments. They have an amazingly inept offense that the head coach designed and calls the plays for.
Nearly every major personnel decision they have made the past couple of years, each one made with a defensible rationale, seems to somehow be causing them embarrassment, sometimes unfathomable amounts of it.
Mistakes have been made by both the GM and the head coach. Even things that seemed like the right decisions have managed to go sideways.
I know all of that. I know that the expected path in these situations, the easy path is for ownership to wield the hammer, to fire people, to show the fans they are doing something, that they are trying to fix the problem by throwing out the current leadership and trying something else.
I know it might happen. Maybe that it’s likely to happen, at least to the head coach. I am not sure it would be the right play.
“I still have confidence in both of them.”
He also added this:
“I’ve probably been guilty of not being patient enough in recent years. That’s one of the reasons I’m committed to Joe and Brian Daboll and giving them a chance to turn this thing around.
“It’s very difficult because the last 10 or 12 years have not been very good for our fans. It makes it particularly difficult. But you’ve got to do the right thing. And we are committed to doing that, committed to seeing this process through.”
The Giants have ridden a dizzying merry-go-round of GMs and head coaches since they forcibly removed Tom Coughlin from his job after the 2015 season.
The ride has to stop somewhere.
Each GM change leads to a full restructuring of the front office and scouting staff. That is a process that takes multiple offseasons. Each coaching change leads to a tear down of whatever personnel is in place and a rebuild. The brutal truth is no coach wants to succeed — or fail — based on someone else’s choices. He wants to make his own. Again, this is a process that requires multiple years.
To me, the current Giants’ regime is in the middle, maybe even still in the early stages, of a long-term project.
Schoen and Daboll have made mistakes, no doubt. There has probably been too much leadership stripped from the locker room. Still, there are some veteran leaders — not enough, but some. There is an exciting core of young, talented players to build with.
What there is not is a quarterback.
The Giants are 1-6 in one-score games, 1-7 in close games if you count a 17-7 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals that was a 10-7 game until a 30-yard Chase Brown touchdown run with 1:52 to play.
There is an argument to be made that the Giants could be 5-7, 6-6, if you want to be really optimistic maybe even 7-5 with better quarterback play.
Would we even be having this discussion about Schoen and Daboll if that were the case? No, we wouldn’t.
Schoen and Daboll were hired largely to make a decision about the quarterback they inherited, and to find the next one if they determined he wasn’t the guy. It took longer than anyone, including Schoen, anticipated but they finally have made the decision that Daniel Jones isn’t the guy.
Jones was always going to the quarterback in 2022, Year 1 for Schoen and Daboll. The way 2022 went, there was no chance Jones wouldn’t be the quarterback in 2023. They tried to find his replacement in the 2024 NFL Draft and couldn’t swing a deal for the guy they wanted — who, incidentally, looks like a heckuva player.
The “process” Mara referred to isn’t finished. In my view, ownership should let them finish the job by taking a swing at finding that replacement for Jones. If Schoen and Daboll can’t get it right, then you move on. At least at that point you know you let the process play all the way out.
One other thing: The biggest decisions of the Schoen era have been about Jones and Saquon Barkley. It is easy to blame Schoen for them, but before he uses those moves as a reason to fire the GM Mara needs to be honest about his own culpability. He could easily have made both of those situations turn out differently.
History as your guide
In the above-mentioned — and embedded — podcast, I stumbled in trying to find an example of a regime that took multiple years to find its footing before finding success.
