John Mara will be smiling when he introduces the Giants’ new head coach to the world, and with good reason. He’s got a new GM, too, new optimism and new hope. There’s even a feeling that, after a decade of pain and misery, his franchise might finally be back on the right track.
Now he just has to brace himself so he doesn’t panic when it feels like everything is going off the rails.
Because it’s going to happen, no matter how good new GM Joe Schoen and new coach Brian Daboll are. Things are looking up, but the ride isn’t going to be straight to the top. There will be stretches where nothing goes right. There will be bad draft picks, bad contracts and bad in-game decisions. There’ll be some regression at times, maybe even an unexpectedly bad year.
He has to steel himself for that and so does his co-owner, Steve Tisch, because the best owners, the best franchises, don’t operate in a constant state of panic. And let’s be honest, that’s what the Giants have been in over the last eight years. At the first sign of trouble, they grab the while of the train they’re on and start swerving in search of a newer, shinier track.
“I’m dying to get off this train,” Mara said on Monday, when he was introducing his third GM since 2017. “I hate being in the position that we’re in right now. I want continuity. I want somebody who’s going to be in the building for a long period of time.
“I don’t want to do another one of the press conferences for many, many years.”
The irony of that is, he’s getting really good at them — not surprising, since practice makes perfect. Since Jan. 4, 2016, the day he broke up the double Super Bowl-winning team of Jerry Reese and Tom Coughlin, he has changed GMs twice and changes coaches four times, all in a six-year, 3 ½-week span. The stability he often talks about craving has become more of a distant, fuzzy dream.
And that’s a self-inflicted wound — not just because the Giants have made some poor choices and had a questionable hiring process, but because ownership grew intolerant of short-term pain. Mara still regrets firing Ben McAdoo late in 2017, less than a year after he took the Giants to their last playoff berth in his first season. But he panicked in Year 2 when he saw the locker room crumbling, got angry and embarrassed at the public reaction when Eli Manning’s benching was bungled, and swept out his two-time, Super Bowl-winning GM and young coach without ever giving them a chance to fix the mess.
Pat Shurmur, the “adult in the room,” followed but he never had a chance under the weight of then new-GM Dave Gettleman’s poor personnel choices, and he was out after a 4-12 second season. His firing happened even though the future was starting to look a little brighter thanks to then-rookie quarterback Daniel Jones. To be honest, Mara didn’t sound so broken up about that coaching change. But he certainly did after firing Joe Judge, following a season in which his team was absolutely decimated by injuries. Mara booted him anyway, two months after saying publicly he believed in his coach as much as ever. He was scared and scarred into changing his mind by a season-ending spiral even though Mara later admitted, “I still think there’s a really good head coach inside of Joe Judge.”
Just like with McAdoo four years earlier, Mara just wasn’t willing to endure the growing pains or take the time to really find out.
That has to stop, now. Mara and Tisch need to trust their process — a really good process, by the way — that led them to Schoen and Daboll. They have to believe they have the right men in charge and let them do their thing. Fixing this Giants mess isn’t going to be easy. There is not going to be obvious improvement every week, every season. There are things – injuries, a tough schedule, even bad luck – that sometimes get in the way.
So barring a disaster — a real one, like players openly revolting against the coach or, say, an 0-17 season — the owners have to make a vow right now that Schoen and Daboll will still be running the show in 2024. Then, after three seasons, they can make a more reasonable judgement. And even then, they can’t just be spooked by a down year.
Because stuff happens. What if Gettleman totally whiffed on Jones as the Giants franchise quarterback? What if Daboll finds out this season that the quarterback’s issues just can’t be fixed? Or what if Jones’ neck injury or other injuries make it clear to the Giants that they can’t invest in him long term? None of that would be the fault of Schoen or Daboll, but it would be a setback to their program. It would turn 2022 into a wasted season and make 2023, likely with a rookie quarterback, a transition year.
Hopefully, for the Giants, none of that happens. Hopefully, for New York, Daboll turns Jones into a poor man’s Josh Allen and that will spark a run of success the Giants haven’t seen since the heydays of Coughlin and Reese. But that’s unlikely in the short term. Even Coughlin and Reese struggled at the start. Never forget that Mara came awfully close to firing Coughlin after the Giants dropped from 11-5 to 8-8 — but still made the playoffs — in his third season, all because the media seemed to hate him and his players hadn’t learned to love him yet.
The lesson of that should’ve been that patience is indeed a virtue. The Giants owners just didn’t learn it well.
Maybe their six-year run of knee-jerk, panic moves has actually led them to a good place. If Schoen and Daboll hoist a Super Bowl trophy at some point, those years will be looked at as a necessary bottoming out and nobody will care anymore about the pain. But the only chance for that to happen is if Mara and Tisch can brace themselves for the rough spots, the bad press, the losing streaks, the boos, the half-empty stadiums, the angry back pages, and the tough questions from the press.
That’s all coming, because it always does. The ride to the top for most sports teams is more of a roller coaster than a straight, steady climb. They need to hold strong, hold fast, and at least for the next three years or so keep their hands on the proverbial wheel even if its too foggy to see where the tracks ahead are going.
They can not run, jump or swerve at the first sign of trouble anymore. They need to force themselves to have the kind of stability they know the Giants need. Because the track they’ve been on just can’t go on forever.
The crazy train has to stop.