“It’s time for us to start winning,” Giants co-owner Jon Mara told reporters in March. “It was a very difficult four or five year period for us. I was tired of losing and having a post-season press conference trying to explain what went wrong and why I think we are making progress.”
Mara is tired of explaining the loss, and Giants fans – myself included – are tired of watching her. New York’s loss Monday Night Football This week has been particularly stressful. The Giants were decimated by the pirates in a 3-10 loss which was really disgusting to watch. Imagine making a casserole out of smelly black markers; This is how the giants play.
The Giants have been rotting over the past half decade or so, but you’ll rarely find a juxtaposition more stark between two offenses than Monday’s match. Tom Brady sliced up the Giants’ defense as if he were taking an electric knife to a turkey. Meanwhile, Giants quarterback Daniel Jones looked like he was using a slotted spoon. In the process, the New York season slipped into her hands. With the loss, the Giants dropped to 3-7, making them one of the (pathetic) small handful of teams to have dropped out of the knockout race in a season-set date. Seemingly Every team in the race.
New York’s response to the loss was to fire offensive coordinator Jason Jarrett. There is no question, this was the right decision. Crime is supposed to be a drop – and since Garrett was signed in 2020, the Giants have ranked last in the dead in offensive touchdowns. In case that wasn’t reason enough to fire him, losing to the Bucs was Garrett Pizarro’s masterpiece: poor communication, sloppy execution, and a lack of vision for how to put players in positions for success. The crime of the giants is predictable, sloppy, and unimaginable.
It would be easy to ignite Jarrett for a loss on Monday. Why didn’t the Giants attack the injury-ravaged Tampa Bay minor, forcing the Bucs to start seven players in the league this season? Why didn’t the Giants team design play for their two best players, Kadarius Toney and Saquon Barkley? Why did New York’s only offensive drop come when the defense intercepted the ball and returned it to the five-yard line? Why did the giants burn 25 seconds before radio communication on the 4th and 1st call (which obviously failed)? Why did Kenny Goladay, the recipient who paid the Giants $18 million in off-season annual salary, get fewer touchdowns from left-handed tackle than Andrew Thomas? But Garrett’s ignition is very easy. It also misses the point.
The real story is not that the giants kicked out Garrett. The disaster that Mara needs to address is why Garrett was ever hired. Garrett spent nine and a half years as a coach for the Dallas Cowboys. Their defining characteristic under him was less than the sum of their parts. His Cowboys offenses were an embarrassment of fortunes: the league’s best offensive line, talented skilled players, and a smooth quarterback transition from Tony Romo to Dak Prescott. These are lists that most coaches dream of, yet Jarrett’s players have complained for years that their attack was too predictable. The Cowboys’ special bands play has been horrific for years, a sign of their lack of attention to detail. Garrett’s clock management was horrible, which is really inexplicable for the coach who gave up playing in 2013. (If the coach doesn’t call for plays, why aren’t they excellent at running the clock?) Upon hiring Garrett, the Giants got the worst of the Cowboys Over the past decade: all the neglect and poor attention to detail without the same level of talent.
Again, this was not difficult to predict. Was there one – literally, One—A Cowboys fan who was upset that the Giants hired Jason Jarrett? (The atmosphere was more Lol, good luck with that.) I’m a Giants fan, and I can tell you every Giants fan I know has been dumbfounded because of Garrett’s hire. It went just as anyone who watched Dallas in the 2010s predicted that it would end when Garrett is awarded the worst roster in the NFC East instead of the best. The Giants are supposed to know their rivals in the division better than they know the other teams. Haven’t they watched the last decade of the Cowboy Championship? How can the Giants evaluate Dallas’ coaching decisions over the past decade and decide that Garrett would improve their team, or that Garrett was a good mentor for Joe Judge or a good coordinator for Daniel Jones? Rather, the lack of attention to detail, the management of the clock, and the general lack of preparation – the dirt –That identified Dallas plagued giants.
Hiring Jarrett is a symptom of New York’s fault, not the cause. His dismissal is also the easiest of a series of crucial decisions the Giants have to make off-season. They need to determine the futures of general manager Dave Gittleman, coach Joe Judge, quarterback Daniel Jones and back-to-back Saquon Barkley. (without pressure!)
The first step is to fire Gettleman. This should also be easy. The Giants are 18-40 since Gettleman was signed. The only teams with a worse record in that period are the Jets, Jaguars and Lions. In other words, the giants joined the gutter feeders.
Gettleman made some good moves, even ones that weren’t popular at the time, like trading Odell Beckham Jr. , drafting Julian Love and Darius Slayton, and signing free agents like Logan Ryan. Gettleman seems to be a really good NFL scout and talent assessor, but he looks really Bad at applying that knowledge to team management. There is a difference between discovering talent and knowing how much limited resources should be used to acquire and retain that talent. Gettleman showed little understanding of players’ market value, either in max dollars or the value of a draft pick (eg, drafting Barkley at number two, using third-round picking on Sam Beal’s rib corner, spending $18 million annually for Kenny Golladay). Perhaps Gettleman’s true legacy was Barkley’s lack of drafting. 2, since no undoing the draft may ever be taken again. Gettleman
It might as well be Lucille Bluth from stunted development I think bananas cost $10.
For all his talent-assessment skills, Gettleman has also sniffed many players. One of his primary stated goals when he took office was to craft “Hog Mollies,” an odd term to describe men of the great offensive and defensive line. Every member of the Giants’ current O line has been acquired by Gettleman, and the result is one of the worst units in the NFL. The Giants also have one of the five worst assists. Injuries played a big role, but better returns were expected in –Checks the pocket watchFourth year of construction.
But, like Jarrett, criticizing Gettleman is made all too easy. There are more pressing issues that the leadership of the Giants need to address, such as whether the range of key players should be expanded. Giving Barkley a lucrative contract appears to be an obvious mistake given the injury history, potential cost and how easy it is to replace the full-back. Jones’ situation is more complicated. He was exactly the kind of player who landed the team in full-back purgatory – too good to be replaced, not good enough to win the playoff. The wisest move would be to pick Jones’ fifth-year option, keep him on contract until the end of 2023, and let the Gettleman substitute decide whether he wants to deal with Jones or make a potential QB decision with one of their picks in the first round. Next year.
Garrett, Gittleman, and Jones will be blamed for the failures of the Giants (and rightfully so), but Mara and the rest of the team ownership must take responsibility as well. Over the past five years—a period that stretches before any of their New York tenures—the Giants have had the second-worst record in the NFL. When a team has been this bad for so long, it’s not more about the people who are going to be fired and more about the people doing the shooting.