It doesn’t look like the New York Giants are going to win under Pat Shurmur. The team picked up their eighth straight loss on Sunday and despite claims from Shurmur that the players are developing, that hasn’t been seen on the field – the performances this year have been consistently bad and giving Shurmur more time to work on the issues of the current roster have only seen those performance levels drop rather than rise.
Shurmur is almost certainly on the way out this offseason, which puts the Giants at a crossroads. John Mara will be faced with the decision of where to take the franchise from here, and the Giants have a few different options.
They can try to keep going with the current roster and just change the head coach, and probably the General Manager too. Or they can burn things down and start from the ground up.
Sure, there’s a few players that the Giants should stick with through the rebuilding process, Saquon Barkley being a notable one. But for most of the roster, it looks like the best option might just be reshaping things completely and leaving few players safe from the changes.
Of course, the Giants have tried this before.
But this roster put together by Gettleman has proven itself to not be more effective than the Reese-built one that came before it. In some ways, it’s worse. The Giants were bad when Gettleman took over, but they weren’t as far removed from success of any kind as they are right now.
In 2016 it looked like the Giants had a chance to make it all the way in the playoffs. Not a large chance, but that was still a far cry from the hopelessness of today. And then the next season brought much worse results and that team would eventually be broken up to make way for Gettleman’s preferred players. We all know, however, how those additions turned out.
Some of them worked, like drafting Barkley. Some of them have hardly helped in improving the results, as seen by a two win record at this point in the season.
No one likes jumping from one rebuild to the other, but at this point it might be the best option – burning it down and leaving very few players untouchable is the better option compared to bringing in a new head coach and expecting better results with a roster that was built by Gettleman for Shurmur to lead.
You could even make an argument that Daniel Jones shouldn’t be safe. He’s undeniably this regime’s guy so to speak, and while Jones has shown plenty of promise, he’s still had his fair share of problems.
That’s not to say that Jones should definitely be excluded from the team’s future plans – the overarching point is that the Giants should put more control in the next staff to decide that rather than trying to go into the future using the unsuccessful blueprint that was laid out during this season and the last season.
And for that matter, the Giants should also consider switching up their usual structure. One of the reasons they couldn’t attract a better head coach than Pat Shurmur was that ownership was unwilling to give roster authority to a prospective coach rather than General Manager.
Keeping a General Manager, though, hasn’t helped the Giants improve their results. Most would say the franchise has suffered more under Gettleman, even. If the Giants want to get back to a better place, they should do whatever they need to do to secure a long term head coach who will avoid the same fate as Shurmur – even if it means giving more control to someone than they normally would.
The Giants can either make changes, probably suffer through another bad season or two, and step away from the norm for the chance of bouncing back… Or they can try to do something different while keeping the same core together. Neither option is pleasant, per say. But the former offers something the other path doesn’t – a chance to truly leave the last couple of years behind and try something different.