Hard Knocks Offseason debuted this week, showcasing a little bit of what went into the New York Giants’ pre-draft spring…and one thing possibly stood out: is John Mara TOO involved in football decisions?
“To me, if I'm an owner – and yes, I own the team, I have say – but if I hired you to make football decisions, and you are now entering your third off-season and make said football decisions, and you have a playoff year under it, you know what I want to hear from my owner when my general manager tells me, hey, listen, we're gonna let him test the market just the way it is?” Shaun asked. “I wanna hear, ‘Joe, the football operations are in your hand,’ not ‘gee, what's our identity gonna be?’ What's our identity gonna be? They scored 15.6 points per game, you know what their identity was? SUCKING!”
This, if you saw it, was in reference to Mara’s statement to Joe Schoen when Schoen was discussing letting Saquon Barkley walk, and yes, Moose agrees that an owner should be kept abreast of things – but there are other reasons the Giants offense underperformed.
“They were terrible, but there's a lot of reasons why they were terrible; for one, the offensive line was dreadful, one of the worst offensive lines in the NFL,” Moose said. “It wasn't just on the play calling or the fact the quarterback got hurt and we went through everything with Tommy Cutlets and all that nonsense that we went through last year with the Giants. There's myriad different reasons why they looked the way they did – and also a regression, you would say, from Brian Daboll as a head coach. Year 1 was basically the Pied Piper, and year 2 you saw some warts, but that was a vast learning experience.”
The Saquon situation, though, is maybe one example where Shaun was right?
“I’ve never owned anything or run a franchise, but I would imagine, given the fact we all know that Saquon is a really good guy, that emotions do come into play, and that John Mara liked the fact that Shawn Barkley was a giant. So, he says. all things being equal, he would like to have Saquon back,” Moose said. “Well, all things weren't equal, right? So yeah, he’s looking at Saquon, and looking around the stadium and seeing a number of people wearing the No. 26 jersey, and he understands Saquon is a very popular guy. But business comes into the equation as well – what is this offense going to look like? If it was this bad with him, what’s it gonna look like without him? And I think that's a fair question and a fair assessment.”
“Could it look worse?” Shaun shot back. “They scored the least amount of points per game then they had since like the seventies, and they didn’t score this few points in a year where Mike Glennon and Jake Fromm took snaps! I mean, it cannot look worse than it did. They added Malik Nabers and got some offensive line help, but whether that's enough, I don’t know.”
And then, Shaun had the dagger:
“When he says, ‘I might have to use a high pick again on a running back,’ he didn’t, yet, but how much longer of a leash is Joe Schoen gonna have if John Mara is already thinking that?” Shaun asked. “If they don't win enough games this year, what if John Mara pulls the plug? Does he go back to the comfortability of promoting from within and then telling somebody to go drat a running back? There are tangible things that John Mara said in that little conversation that scared me to death as a Giants fan.”
“I understand he’s had some examples of late – Joe Judge was not salvageable, and in the end, there was no way he was coming back – but I think all things being equal, Mara and Steve Tisch would like preach patience here,” Moose replied. “They’d like to show patience and understand the consistent, constant change doesn't necessarily equate to success. You see that historically in the NFL; case in point Washington, constantly in a state of transition and losing football games left and right, embarrassing themselves, and now have a new ownership group.”
So Moose gets it, but isn’t afraid for the GM.
“I don't think Joe Schoen's job is on the line, but it’s gotta look better; you mentioned it, that it looked so bad last year that you called into question the coaching, the preparedness, the talent evaluators. Everything looked so bad last year as compared to the year previous that it has got to take a massive step forward here in year number three, and start to resemble what we saw from the Giants in year number one.”