The season isn’t over yet but that doesn’t mean one can’t speculate on what’s to come for the New York Giants, and specifically their head coaching position. The Giants look likely to fire Pat Shurmur in the offseason after a clear regression of the team, and little to no positive progress made in Shurmur’s second season after a disaster of a first year already cast doubts into the minds of some.
Long story short, it doesn’t look like Shurmur will get a third season and there’s already plenty of talk about who will be the one to replace him.
One of the names coming up for the coaching search is Matt Rhule – the name will be more familiar to those who follow college football, obviously, as Rhule is the current head coach of the Baylor Bears. Before that, Rhule was known for taking Temple to relevance and bringing them from an afterthought to a conference contender.
There’s a different significant to Rhule when it comes to the Giants, however. He’s a native New Yorker who’s never quite left this region, having played at Penn State in college (under Brooklyn native Joe Paterno) and also received a Master’s degree further upstate at the University at Buffalo after that.
And he’s familiar with the Giants organization, having spent 2012 as the assistant offensive line coach for the team before heading back to Temple, a place where he was formerly an assistant, to take over as the head coach.
There are some positives that can be seen from Rhule’s time at Temple – despite the school not exactly being the most known for its football program, Rhule managed to make them relevant on the national scene through contention in the American Athletic Conference. He brought them two conference championship game appearances and one win, coming in 2016, just before he left for Baylor.
Since the 2017 season, Rhule has been at Baylor, a former national contender that had in recent memory produced Heisman winner and second overall NFL draft pick Robert Griffin III, as well as former Jets quarterback Bryce Petty. Baylor had fallen off from their good run by this point, marred by scandal and the exit of head coach Art Briles due to it, but Rhule has done well enough to take the Bears from 1-11 to 7-6, over the course of his first two seasons.
With two games left in the season, the Rhule led Bears are the eleventh ranked team in the country and have a 10-1 record. One of those two games left is the conference championship game, and they could very well be the team to break the dominance of Oklahoma in the Big XII.
However, the Giants should still be careful when looking at Rhule as a prospect.
The last coaches that the Giants have hired haven’t exactly been big names – they’ve tried to follow after the footsteps of teams like the Rams and bring in unproven coaches that have potential. Obviously, that didn’t pan out with either Ben McAdoo or Pat Shurmur. Rhule isn’t a proven coach either, not at this level.
Baylor is his first big conference job and this is his first real successful season at Baylor – not a season where they get a moral victory by finishing one game over .500, but a legitimately successful season. And one can hardly compare coaching at Temple to coaching in one of the most demanding jobs in the NFL.
That’s not to say every head coach needs to have a long NFL track record behind him, as there have been a number of coaches to come on the scene with little existing fame only to make a name for themselves with quick success, but those coaches are admittedly rarer than ones that have established themselves already.
The Giants can’t afford to make the mistake of hiring another Pat Shurmur while thinking that they’re hiring he next Sean McVay. Rhule could go on to have success but he could also adapt badly to the NFL game. It’s very different from college and we haven’t even seen Rhule have extended success with a major college team just yet.
We’ve likely already seen Jason Garrett’s ceiling, but we also know that his floor isn’t too low. There’s no telling how low the floor is for Rhule and his performances, and if the Giants misjudge, they could end up in the spot they’re in now once again.
They don’t need more risks right now. They need someone to get the team back to playing decent, contending for the division and preventing the team from being eliminated from the playoffs with this many games left in the season, and to most of all turn around the reputation that the Giants are picking up as a joke around the league.
Franchise prestige is on the line here. Can the Giants really risk a third straight bad hire by taking the candidate who has more potential but is more of an unknown?