After a 40–0 loss to the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football, it’s a little strange to say that the Giants are right where they should be, but give me a second.
While we try to destroy platitudes in football and not accept them, the idea of the Giants’ being a victim of their own success last year—namely, the herculean lift done by Coach of the Year Brian Daboll, offensive coordinator Mike Kafka and defensive coordinator Wink Martdinale—holds a little bit of weight.
Not long ago, when the team was searching for a new general manager, it was refreshing to hear that someone had finally gotten across the idea no one else high up in the organization previously had the ability to: Despite years of high draft picks and a wave of lavish free-agent spending over the last decade, this roster was not in good shape, and it would take a bit of a climb to get it there.
Then, Daboll and Kafka yanked the best out of Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley. Martdinale took his patchwork quilt of defenders and, in nine of the team’s 17 games, held the opposing offense under 20 points. Their blend of ideas, Ravenslike, Chiefsish, Billsian, was fresh enough to catch a lot of teams off guard. A second-chance Barkley run on a near-dead walk-off attempt in Nashville led to an upset of the Titans, then came a win over the drowning Panthers, and from that moment the rebuild was off.
Kevin R. Wexler/NorthJersey.com / USA TODAY Network
Fast forward to Sunday night and, to general manager Joe Schoen’s credit, there is a team on the field that bought into the hype only in the most responsible way. Their upgrades were marginal and reflected the truth of 2022: A group of coaches coached their you-know-whats off, and a group of players played their you-know-whats off. While the former was capable of replicating a performance to some degree, the latter may have reached its limitations physically, especially since the rest of the conference’s superpowers only got better.
So, Isaiah Simmons came over for a seventh-round pick. Darren Waller came over for a third-round pick. Daniel Jones was re-signed, yes, but after 2024 his contract becomes easier to get out of than a pair of costume handcuffs. They held the line on a 26-year-old Barkley and are not committed to him beyond this season. Most of the contracts they handed out were for one or two years, save for Bobby Okereke, the linebacker from Indianapolis (four years, $40 million) and defensive tackle Rakeem Nunez-Roches from Tampa Bay (three years, $12 million).
While I don’t always speak general manager, to me this translated to: We still think our initial evaluation might have been right, so let’s play both sides of the fence without robbing valuable draft equity and free-agency dollars from a period of time in the future more strategically aligned with a realistic window of competitive opportunity.
The Eagles are still, largely, an Eagles team that stiff-armed the Giants easily in the playoffs last year. The Cowboys, as we saw Sunday, are probably the NFC’s next-best chance to produce a Super Bowl champion behind the 49ers this year. Their defense alone, especially when juxtaposed with the Giants’ young core and nascent group of playmakers, is not close to being on the same level, no matter how well-schemed Jones and Barkley turned out to be.
The amount of free-agency money that it would have taken this offseason to put the Giants on equal footing with the Cowboys would have been nearly impossible to spend without drastically kneecapping the team down the road. Even if the Giants had signed Odell Beckham Jr., Allen Lazard and DeAndre Hopkins this past offseason, they may have only lost by two touchdowns instead of a million. But it would still have been a loss, and it would have repeated the team’s biggest problem since its last Super Bowl victory in 2011: pushing off the need for a real, strategic teardown.
For 2023, the Giants didn’t really have a choice. The ’22 season went well. Too well. Now with the league’s hardest schedule on tap (enjoy that short-rest Thursday Night Football game against the 49ers in Week 3 after next week’s road trip to Arizona!) we may be seeing a slightly more circuitous acknowledgement of just how far they had to go, and just how truly impressive and unforeseen last season really was.
