The last three weeks for the Giants are quite interesting, if you look at them through a certain lens.
GM Dave Gettleman retired on January 10, and a day later, head coach Joe Judge was fired. Just 10 days later, though, the Giants had a new GM in Joe Schoen, who they then had to turn around and immediately trust as a voice in the search for a new head coach, which turned out to be someone he worked with prior in Buffalo in Brian Daboll.
A whirlwind month of January that ended with Daboll’s introductory presser on Monday, but that doesn’t mean that co-owner, President and CEO John Mara’s job is done.
“Well, not really. We still have to hire the rest of the staff and they're busy working on that right now and then we're going to have to make some very difficult decisions, or I should say they're going to have to make some very difficult decisions on getting us under the cap and putting us in a position where we're going to be in a healthy cap situation going forward,” Mara said Monday. “And then we have the draft coming up, so no, there's no rest. I'm not going to rest until we start winning games.”
When it comes to that staff, Mara pledges to help Schoen and Daboll with whatever they need to get the Giants moving in the right direction.
“If they want to make changes in the building – staffing, get different equipment in here, do something – it’s whatever they need to do,” Mara said. “Whenever I get asked about anything like that, my response is, 'is it going to help us win? Tell me it's going to help us win and you have it.' That's what they're talking about.”
One thing Daboll wants, but is dependent on how things shake out around the league, is defensive coordinator Patrick Graham back with Big Blue. Graham has interviewed for Minnesota’s head job and also for the DC spot in Pittsburgh, but if neither of those work out, both Mara and Schoen are down with at least one holdover from the Joe Judge era.
“He's very well-respected in this building. The players have a lot of respect for him, as do I. He's a terrific defensive coordinator,” Mara said. “For his own sake, I hope he gets a head coaching job, but as Brian said, selfishly, we'd be very happy if he stayed.”
“I didn't know Patrick Graham, but when we interviewed him for this head coaching job, I did my research on him and there's a lot of positive feedback, not only in the building but around the league on Patrick,” Schoen added. “He had been at Notre Dame, he had been with New England, Green Bay, and Miami. Just spending three hours with him in an interview setting, he's passionate, very high football acumen, he got me fired up in the interview.
He did a really good job, so if he gets that Minnesota job, that's great for him, and I’m happy for him, because it’s a great opportunity. Selfishly, I would love to keep him here because I'm fired up to work with him because I think he's a good ball coach.”
That also would be helpful to the Giants, given that it seems their defensive system wouldn’t change much at the outset.
“We’ll cross that bridge if he’s not here, because we’ll have to look at the candidates, but it’s no different than the offensive coordinator, thinking these are the pieces here, so let’s develop the best offense we can around these pieces that we have in place,” Schoen said. “If Patrick gets the (Minnesota) job, we would likely do the same thing; we would have to look for other defensive coordinator candidates and look at the pieces and say, 'Hey, do you want to be a 3-4? You want to be a 4-3? What do you want it to look like?' We're going to leave it up to the defensive coordinator.”
The one thing everyone stressed on Monday, though, was that the Giants are going to take the time to do it right and build a long-term winner – and that’s something that Mara, who understands the fan base’s lack of patience as being similar to his own, has come to grips with.
“It's going to be hard, but I'm going to have to force myself to do it. I've run out of patience over the last few years, but I also understand that this is a long-term project,” Mara said. “This is not an overnight thing. I think last season verified that.”
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