The New York Giants were, in the words of at least one protesting fan, a “dumpster fire” in 2024. They finished with a record of 3-14 and set many historical marks for futility along the way.
The disaster began on the first day of the offseason when head coach Brian Daboll and defensive coordinator Wink Martindale had an explosive meeting that eventually led to a parting of ways.
Things only snowballed from there, including the ugly optics of “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants” and their failure to land a quarterback in the 2024 NFL draft.
When it came time to play, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. That included multiple personnel miscues that led directly to several of those 14 losses.
The roster management is something those of us at Giants Wire griped about all season. It was a bafflingly persistent problem that became a running joke.
In a postmortem published by ESPN’s Jordan Raanan, one source with direct knowledge of the Giants’ inner workings slammed the team for those personnel decisions.
The Giants seemed convinced Ezeudu was primarily a tackle and played him there all spring and summer. When Thomas went down, it was Ezeudu who started the next game in a blowout loss to the Philadelphia Eagles and struggled in the first half. He played better in the second half, but the Giants quickly pivoted and benched him the following week for Chris Hubbard, a veteran who also wasn’t a natural left tackle and had been claimed off the 49ers’ practice squad 10 days earlier.
None of it worked. The Giants moved Ezeudu back to guard in Week 18.
“It’s like they make moves off Twitter,” a league source with knowledge of the Giants’ inner workings told ESPN.
The irony is that had the Giants listened to fans on X, they never would have played Joshua Ezeudu at tackle. They would have also moved Evan Neal inside to guard at this point.
Only the Giants can make armchair general managers look smart.
