Upset over dog act, but when will Mac attack?

Ben McAdoo has to take control of his spiraling Giants, he has to do it now, and he can start by not leaving it to his bosses to criticize Odell Beckham Jr.’s lack of discipline and maturity when the head coach should be the one putting his foot down. “No more Odell questions. Thank you,” Brandon Marshall said in the locker room Tuesday afternoon. This is a distraction that is not going away until McAdoo properly addresses it. Co-owner John Mara finally said Tuesday that if Beckham is a dog, as the star receiver claimed on Sunday, he was in fact a bad dog when he lifted his leg like a urinating canine in Philadelphia. “I do not want to get into a discussion about this, but I will say that I am very un- happy with Odell’s behavior on Sunday and we intend to deal with it internally,” Mara said in a better-late-than-never statement on Beckham’s vulgar touchdown celebration, which inevitably will draw an NFL fine. Even Dwayne Harris, the steady veteran voice of the Giants’ wide receivers room, told the Daily News Tuesday of Beckham’s celebration and 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty: “In a game like that, you can’t have stuff like that. But Odell’s Odell; you never know what he’s gonna do.” That’s exactly the point. So while we’re on the subject of dogs, who neutered McAdoo? Why did the Giants’ head coach lie down and roll over on Sunday after his team fell to 0-3 (“next question”) and again on Monday in a conference call (“we should be talking about the way he played”) when given opportunities to condemn Beckham’s heinous act? Ex-Giants coach Tom Coughlin was the first to enable Beckham’s behavior openly by leaving Beckham in that infamous 2015 game against the Panthers, allowing Beckham’s street fight with Josh Norman to escalate out of control. But it seems McAdoo hasn’t learned a single lesson from his predecessor’s fatal mistake. Let’s not mince words, either. There can be absolutely no way – though he won’t say it – McAdoo condones Beckham’s celebration. It must disgust him. McAdoo is a meat-and-potatoes, do-your-job football lifer from coal mine country whose ideal player exhibits the qualities McAdoo espouses in his team mantra: “Sound, smart and tough, committed to discipline and poise.” But the hard truth is that “tough” is the only one of those qualities McAdoo’s Giants consistently exhibit, and that might be because when McAdoo publicly enables Beckham’s antics, it’s as good as throwing the words “discipline and poise” right out the window. McAdoo gave a speech to the players Tuesday, according to Jason Pierre-Paul, and no one knows what he’s saying behind closed doors. But he needs to take a public stand. What’s strange about McAdoo’s reluctance to criticize Beckham is that he didn’t start his rookie 2016 coaching season this way. When Beckham threw a Week 3 sideline tantrum and slammed the kicking net with his helmet, swinging the net’s metal bar back into Beckham’s face, McAdoo pointedly criticized him. “He needs to control his emotions better and become less of a distraction to himself and to his teammates,” McAdoo said in the next day’s conference call. “It’s our job to help him with that process and maturing.”

But by the time Beckham took the Giants receivers on that ill-advised, playoff-week Miami party trip, McAdoo had changed his approach. Mum was now the word. “The players were off,” McAdoo said days before a 25-point, wild-card loss in Green Bay that included four big drops from Beckham and Shepard combined. “They showed up Tuesday ready to work and had a good practice today.”

Jerry Reese finally said something Jan. 9 after Beckham put a hole in the wall outside the visitors’ locker room at Lambeau Field: “I see a guy who needs to think about some of the things that he does,” the GM said. “We all have had to grow up at different times in our lives, and I think it is time for him to do that.” McAdoo joined that fray gently, saying “that’s not the way we want to be acting after ball games.”

But Beckham continued to do whatever he wanted, sat out of OTAs to seek a new contract, and created a distraction two days before training camp by saying he wants to be the highest-paid player in the NFL.

Mara on July 28, though, said Beckham should just “keep doing what he’s doing. Keep playing. He’s going to get a longterm contract. We’re not asking him to prove anything at this point. Just keep playing as hard as he’s been playing and continuing your growth off the field as a person. I’m confident he’s going to do both.”

And yet, Beckham demonstrated his continuing inability to understand or care about the perception of his actions when he was out dancing days before missing the Giants’ Week 1 loss in Dallas with an ankle injury.

Then on Sunday, there was Beckham lifting his leg to pee like a dog on national television. He also appeared to involve Shepard in the celebration (picking up after the dog), though Shepard denied that on Tuesday. Remember Beckham put Shepard in a bad position with the Miami boat party, too? The Giants can’t like that. Add Marshall’s pre-game screaming match with an Eagles fan, and the perception is these Giants are losing control.

Mara now seems to realize, maybe too late, that enough is enough. It always has been on ownership and on Reese to set the tone on Beckham from the top down, and their reluctance to do so sooner and more severely may have undermined McAdoo. It remains unanswered, too, why McAdoo suddenly backed off on his criticisms last year, if it were suggested perhaps that he leave such discipline to someone else. But McAdoo can’t remain idle. This is his team. He is the head coach. And on his watch, the ‘Giant Way’ involves a man pretending to urinate like a dog on a football field. Enough is enough.