It’s Mac’s team but Tom still gets blame

Ben McAdoo has regressed into Ben No-Can-doo. Where is the progression from year one to year two as a head coach? Why does it appear he has lost the team? Will he even be given a chance by John Mara and Steve Tisch to get to year three?

McAdoo has gone from an 11-5 rookie year to a sophomore slump of 0-5. The Giants are in turmoil, disarray, chaos, etc.

DRC has replaced OBJ as a huge distraction but this season was pretty much DOA as soon the Giants stepped on the field at AT&T Stadium against the Cowboys in the opener and showed no sense of urgency.

All the ugly behind-the-scenes stuff makes its way to the surface on a losing team, especially a team like the Giants who thought they were a serious Super Bowl contender. McAdoo has 11 games to prove to Mara and Tisch that he is not in over his head, but the Giants’ discipline problems go back to the final days of Tom Coughlin’s regime.

Coughlin, who thought he was as tough as his hero Vince Lombardi, set the blueprint for the current Giants dysfunction that is on the verge of blowing up the organization.

Remember when Coughlin was named the Giants coach in 2004 and he soon fined future Hall of Famer Michael Strahan $1,000 for being early to a team meeting, but not the required five minutes early?

Then in a December game in Coughlin’s final season with the Giants in 2015, he didn’t sit Odell Beckham Jr. down for even one play during his street brawl against Josh Norman that humiliated the organization and resulted in OBJ being assessed three personal foul penalties. The league suspended him for the next game.

Coughlin became indignant after the Beckham-Norman game when I asked him why he didn’t bench him. “You want me to take him out of the game?” Coughlin said with a large degree of disgust. Uh, yes. The Coughlin of 2004 would have fired the Coughlin of 2015 on the spot.

Coughlin was desperately fighting to hold onto his job in a season the Giants would once again finish 6-10. Discipline be damned. Teaching Beckham a lesson that even players with once-in-a-lifetime skills are not bigger than the team didn’t cross his mind.

Riding shotgun with Coughlin in his final two seasons was McAdoo, who is now too busy with his head in his oversized play-call sheet to realize that being the head coach requires more than calling the offensive plays, which, by the way, he’s done a terrible job with for most of his 21 games after showing such promise working with Eli Manning in his two years as coordinator. Fact: It’s impossible to predict if a successful coordinator will become a successful head coach.

The discipline issue boiled over with Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie having a problem with McAdoo during Sunday’s loss to the Chargers, and it carrying over into Tuesday when McAdoo told him he would be inactive for Sunday night’s game in Denver. It culminated in DRC showing up Wednesday and then leaving the facility and getting suspended. He is supposed to return Thursday.

If McAdoo really wants to make a statement in this wasted season, he will tell DRC he will come back when he tells him he can come back.

What about the perception that McAdoo has lost the locker room?

“Not concerned about perception,” he said Wednesday. “Concerned about reality.”

McAdoo is a protege of Green Bay’s Mike McCarthy, but here’s what McAdoo learned from Coughlin: Give your best players plenty of rope because if you shorten the leash, it’s not going to take long for them to hang themselves. And coaches can’t win without their best players.

McAdoo displayed no more inclination to discipline OBJ than Coughlin. Unfortunately, Beckham broke his ankle Sunday and is out for the season. Maybe the time away from football will make him realize how much he misses it and how much of a knucklehead he’s been.

Maybe it will also teach McAdoo something as well: Football players like structure and need strong head coaches to set the agenda on behavior. That means when rookie Evan Engram grabs his crotch on national television in the second game of the season, he needed to be benched. When Beckham impersonates a dog peeing in the end zone after he scored in Philly, McAdoo needed to discipline him right away. If Coughlin had considered the big picture two years ago, Beckham might not be such a headache.

Mara, Tisch and the invisible GM Jerry Reese have not provided McAdoo with the proper public support on the hot button issues. McAdoo was forced into being the voice of the organization for too long during the Josh Brown domestic violence case last year until Mara spoke up. Reese has still not addressed the Brown situation and why he gave him a new contract one year after the Giants became aware Brown was accused of abusing his wife.

Once this season started and it became apparent Reese failed McAdoo by bringing back the same offensive line, the coach had to answer questions that were in Reese’s domain. But Reese won’t provide his usual double talk until the Giants’ bye the week of Oct. 23.

It’s a disgrace Reese has chosen to hide from the media to protect himself and leaves his inexperienced coach exposed to explain the miserable shortcomings of the team Reese put together.

It all goes back to Coughlin enabling Beckham. He set the tone for no accountability.