When he met with reporters during the team’s bye week, New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen insisted any personnel moves ahead of a Week 12 game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would be “football decisions.”
“We’re going to evaluate everything the rest of the week and the decisions we make will be football decisions,” Schoen said. “Any decisions we make moving forward as we evaluate the roster and what we’re doing for the final seven games will be football decisions.
“We have seven games left in this season and that’s what we’re focused on. I’m focused on 2024 and how we can get better these final seven games.”
On Monday, the Giants made their first “football decision” by benching quarterback Daniel Jones. However, what they decided after that was not necessarily motivated by attempting to win the final seven games of the season.
Instead of going with backup quarterback Drew Lock, who signed a one-year, $5 million deal this past offseason, the Giants opted to turn the ball over to third-string quarterback Tommy DeVito.
That begs the question: Why?
It could be that the Giants simply haven’t been impressed with what they’ve seen from Lock, which calls into question their ability to evaluate quarterbacks. But they deserve the benefit of the doubt and the assumption that wasn’t the final reasoning.
The only other plausible option is that the Giants made a financial decision to go with DeVito over Lock, not a football one.
Part of the reason Drew Lock isn’t the #Giants QB for the next 7 weeks… pic.twitter.com/qmZaYcsNLE
— Spotrac (@spotrac) November 18, 2024
By avoiding potential incentives in Lock’s contract, Schoen won’t have to readjust his roster to clear salary cap space. It’s another indictment of poor personnel handling but it goes even deeper than that.
For months, the argument has been made that the Giants cheaped out on running back Saquon Barkley when failing to bridge the $2 million gap between them. Some argued it was Jones’ contract that precluded Barkley’s signing. Maybe it was Lock’s?
With the Giants now turning to DeVito, hindsight becomes clear. Had they simply gone with Tommy Cutlets as the backup in the first place, they would have had plenty of money to invest in Barkley.
Yes, benching Jones was the right decision. The argument could be made that going with DeVito is also the best football decision. But the change appears directly tied to Schoen’s poor financial and personnel handling, which is not at all what he claimed just last week.
