The New York Giants, for some odd reason, cannot come to grips with the fact they are bottom dwellers in today’s NFL. They believe their ownership group is in step with the rest of the league and that they just made a few bad choices in attaining their status as the NFL’s official poster children for dysfunction.
After another 5-11 season, they fired their head coach, kept his entire staff in place, then patted their general manager on the back and pointed him back to his office. Not exactly what the fans were hoping for and certainly not the right course of action after two consecutive 5-11 seasons.
Pat Shurmur should have been fired. No one is disputing that. He is not head coaching material and it showed. He is, however, an excellent offensive coordinator and will likely return successfully to those ranks very soon. Dave Gettleman also should have been fired. The game has clearly passed him by. The Giants are deniers when it comes to that fact.
The Giants needed to blow up the building and not look back. They decided not to. Bad move. Another half-measure that is going to come back and bite them. Gettleman will now hire a new coach and then get himself fired next year, leaving that coach behind to twist in the wind. A new GM will come in and who knows if he’ll want to retain that coach. Translation: the Giants will have wasted another year.
Gettleman, in first appearance before the media since July, was almost apologetic in tone, his guff veneer stuffed in his back pocket. But it was obvious he feels he’s done right by the team. “Not good enough” was his answer when asked to evaluate his performance. Not good at all should have been the response.
Success is measured in wins and losses and the Giants have a lot more of the latter these days. What this team needs is a football czar with 21st century chops. Instead, they have an old school thinker overseeing an archaic business model.
“Over time since I’ve been here, we have regenerated, we have rebooted, so to speak, and done a lot of things behind the scenes that needed to be done,'” Gettleman told reporters Tuesday. “John (Mara) alluded to them yesterday. We have completely redone our scouting situation, how we look at college personnel, how we look at pro personnel. We are in the process, we have hired four computer folks, software, and we are completely redoing the backend of our college and pro scouting systems.”
Computer folks. What year is this? Gettleman acknowledged that he was “on notice” which isn’t comforting when you think about it. Who wants a guy on notice making crucial decisions about your team’s future? This is just dumb.
Gettleman further demonstrated his obliviousness when he tried to justify trading a third and a fifth round pick for impending free agent defensive tackle Leonard Williams in October. They still face the challenge of signing Williams this offseason and will have to overpay him to save face.
“We felt we needed him.” said Gettleman. “Again, we felt good about it and we feel, and he’s proven, he’s disruptive in there. He improved our rushing defense with him in there, he buzzes around the quarterback, we’ve just got to get him to finish now. But, the bottom line is we felt it was worth the deal. The juice was worth the squeeze.”
Losing teams with no postseason prospects don’t make in-season trades like this. It’s just bad business. This is the kind of mind the Giants are hitching their wagon to. Strap yourselves in, Giant fans, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.