It is no secret that the New York Giants are at the beginning of a full-scale rebuild after former general manager Dave Gettleman put them in salary cap hell and missed on draft picks up more often than Ereck Flowers missed blocks when he played left tackle for Big Blue.
New GM Joe Schoen has done a solid job working around the salary mess, acquiring players who can compete for starting jobs with minimal cap hits. The team will have plenty of cash flow next off-season, but for now, they have to rebuild the old fashion way, utilizing the NFL draft.
The Giants have a totally new feel about them:
Management’s new strategy is quite different compared to Joe Judge’s system, which relied more on authority and discipline. That’s not to say that Schoen, a new head coach Brian Daboll won’t instill a sense of authority between the coaches and players, but the new operations seem to have more collaboration and synergy.
Given that Daboll is a new head coach, the Giants were able to start their off-season programming a bit early, which fans are used to over the past four seasons having multiple head coaches.
Daboll hosted a few meetings throughout the day on Monday. There’s already a sense of more collaboration, allowing others to talk and not taking over the meetings himself.
“I’d say it was a 20-minute meeting to start out and I’d say 10 minutes of those 20 minutes, I let other people speak – trainers, strength coaches,” Daboll said. “It was a good introductory meeting.
Daboll understands that chemistry needs to be built, which prioritizes communication.
“This is the first day where we’re all back in the building and can get to know one another. There’s a lot of things that we have to install in terms of schematics. But we also have to talk about expectations and standards and get to know one another. There’s a little over five months until we end up playing and a few months before training camp starts. So, this is really just the foundational piece to a long year ahead. We just try to get better each day and do the things that we need to do. Can’t look too far down the road on this thing, it’ll get you pretty quick.”
With the draft quickly approaching in three weeks, the Giants are having to adjust on the fly. Building relationships within the building and preparing for the draft are extremely difficult, but as Daboll suggested, they have five months before football officially begins in September, giving them a nice cushion of time to spark a productive rebuild.