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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.
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.
Plea for patience
Co-owner John Mara pled for patience just a few weeks ago:
“Obviously, we’re all very disappointed with where we are right now,” Mara said. “But I’m going to say one thing, we are not making any changes this season, and I do not anticipate making any changes in the offseason, either.
“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.
The example was right under my nose. Right in the New York Giants’ history books. The George Young-era Giants. Duh!
Young became general manager of the Giants in 1979, a compromise hiring brokered by then-commissioner Pete Rozelle to help heal a fractured Mara family and a fractured franchise. Here are the results of Young’s first five seasons:
- 1979: 6-10
- 1980: 4-12
- 1981: 9-7
- 1982: 4-5 (strike year)
- 1983: 3-12-1 (Bill Parcells’ first year as head coach)
In those days, of course, there was no Internet. There was no social media. There were no radio or TV talking heads. No 24-hour news cycle filled with analysts thirsty for people to rip, for controversy that gives them something to talk about.
If there were, Young might not have survived those first two seasons. He and Parcells almost certainly would survive Year 5, a 3-12-1 disaster that nearly did cost Parcells the head-coaching gig.
What followed might never have happened, either.
That was a 10-year run that included two Super Bowl titles and six playoff appearances.
The Giants believed in Young, they had patience with him and eventually he became the architect of a glorious era of Giant football.
It is, of course, much more difficult today to have that patience. Partly, that is because of sites like this one and companies like SB Nation. I get that.
Still, Mara and Steve Tisch don’t have to look any further than their own organization — any further than the photos that hang along the walls of their 1925 Giants Drive headquarters — to see how it can be rewarded.
I don’t believe Schoen and Daboll have fully completed the mission they were given when they were hired before the 2022 season.
Let them finish it. Patience might be rewarded.
A final thought
I think Daboll is on thinner ice than Schoen. The inability to improve the offense despite taking it away from Mike Kafka, the lack of discipline the Giants play with and the issues Daboll has had with his coaching staff are all demerits that make you wonder if Daboll is the right head coach.
I can see a case for keeping Schoen and moving on from the head coach, provided ownership allows the GM to make the next coaching hire rather than forcing a coach on him.
Still, I think the best path feels like letting Schoen and Daboll try to finish the job together.
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