There’s a lot of attention from New York Giants fans on the position of General Manager, and on some of the other important and notable spots in the front office, but not much of that attention usually reaches the scouts who help the higher ups in making their decisions. In this case, the attention is on the scouting department due to the Giants moving on from two longtime members, going into one of the most important times of the year for scouts: the NFL Combine.
Confirmed by the New York Post, the Giants are moving on from experienced area scouts Ryan Jones and Donnie Etheridge.
Gettlemen let go of Ryan Jones, who was with the Giants for 20 years, and Donnie Etheridge, who was with the team for the past 19 years. Jones worked the northeast region and Etheridge worked with the southwest region, assignments given to them in 2018 when Gettleman took over.
The firing comes while the Giants will be evaluating a number of college prospects for the upcoming NFL Draft, where they hold the fourth overall pick. It’s somewhat interesting that this move came after the Combine already started, but as area scouts both of the fired members of the scouting department may have already completed their assignments of scouting players during the previous college season, which ended last month.
While the reasons for the firing aren’t exactly publicly known, it may have to do with Gettleman’s initiative to change how the front office does certain things – after retaining his job this offseason, Gettleman notably promised to involve analytics more in the team’s decisions, something that might see shifts in personnel to accommodate it.