New York Daily News

MASTER OF DELUSION

Thoughts that they were something Super doomed Jerry & Giants from start

- PAT LEONARD

IF THE Giants’ players truly “bought into” the Super Bowl “hype” and took their feet off the gas for this 1-6 car crash on Easy Street, perhaps it’s because GM Jerry Reese revved up and steered the Big Blue hype train right into training camp with minimal offseason moves that demonstrat­ed satisfacti­on with the 2016 roster in pursuit of a championsh­ip.

Reese can say that his defense hasn’t “played as hungry as we did last year” and that his young players let the “chatter” about their being “a good-looking football team” go to their heads.

But the GM’s decision this offseason to not address several key areas of weakness, and to make only minor complement­ary additions to his roster, indicated that Reese first and foremost believed his Giants were only a few pieces away from winning a Super Bowl this season.

It is truly amazing that Reese and Giants players would let any hype of an 11-win 2016 season get to their heads after their doors were blown off, 38-13, in the wild-card game in Green Bay, which was proof they weren’t anywhere close to true contention.

But that is what true delusion looks like. And here is what it sounds like:

“We felt good about our team going into the season,” Reese said Tuesday at his first press conference since July 27.

Reese felt good, that is, about returning the same offensive line and running backs to an offense that couldn’t move the ball last season. He felt good about making Brandon Marshall, a regressing 33-year-old receiver, and Rhett Ellison, a 29-year-old blocking tight end, his only meaningful free agent additions. He felt good about not upgrading his consistent­ly overmatche­d linebackin­g corps on defense other than promoting second-year middle man B.J. Goodson.

Reese added more coal to the hype train’s engine by re-signing a lot of free agents from last year’s team, including offensive guard John Jerry. And while Reese joked of criticism that he’s “been left for dead a lot of times,” the offensive line — specifical­ly his decision to stick with tackles Ereck Flowers and Bobby Hart — will become the hill this GM dies on.

Reese mind-numbingly first said “our offensive line (is) comparable to a lot of teams” around the NFL, as if what another team does matters even one bit. Then his rationale for not pursuing a free-agent left tackle such as Andrew Whitworth, 35, who has improved the Rams’ line exponentia­lly, was: “We want to be a younger football team … We want to be a younger offensive line. Do you want to try to develop a 23-year old guy or bring in a 36-year old guy? We chose to go the young route.”

But Reese’s young excuse doesn’t check out. Five of the Giants’ 11 oldest players are ones Reese either signed or re-signed this offseason: Marshall, 33, who became the second-oldest player on the roster behind Eli Manning, 35; long-snapper Zak DeOssie, 33, Jerry, 31, Ellison, 29, defensive end Jason PierrePaul, 28, and linebacker Keenan Robinson, 28.

There is a reason for this: Reese was keeping or adding veteran elements to complement his veteran quarterbac­k for a Super Bowl run now.

Reese is telling the truth that he has assembled a young overall roster, but part of the reason is financial, with so many massive contracts on a top-heavy budget led by Manning, Olivier Vernon, Janoris Jenkins and Damon Harrison, and room necessary for big deals for Odell Beckham Jr. and Landon Collins.

And consider, Reese saved his own job in 2016 by dishing out three of those big contracts to Vernon, Jenkins and Harrison, to turn one of the NFL’s worst defenses of all time in something more respectabl­e. Now he has to build young and cheaply around those deals. And so the dominoes fall.

Say this for Reese’s performanc­e on Tuesday: the Giants’ GM came off more accountabl­e and less arrogant than he has publicly in the past two years. Perhaps he knows this could be it.

Reese refreshing­ly owned up that “this roster, it’s my roster. I’m responsibl­e for everybody on the roster, and I’ll take ownership for where we are right now with this 1-6 start.” And he did not once cite injuries as an excuse, which was wise, because while it might be tempting to say that, the Giants were 0-2 before they lost a full-strength Vernon and 0-4 before they lost Beckham for good.

But he still carried that trademark air of defiance, too, when asked about John Mara putting him on notice in Jan. 2016, and now going five seasons in six years without a playoff berth.

“I’d love for us to have won 10 Super Bowls in my tenure as the general manager of the Giants, but we haven’t," Reese said. “I wish we could have. We’ve won some games, but I sure believe we could have done better than we have.”

The audacity. Reese had a good 2007 draft but won that season mainly with a roster assembled by Ernie Accorsi, and come this January his Giants will have made the playoffs in — wait for it — four of his 11 seasons.

Reese’s defenders will point out his first-round pick of talented tight end Evan Engram this past spring, and they’d be right; he’s a good player. But the offensive line went unaddresse­d meaningful­ly in both free agency and the draft, and so the Giants are Rleft with a promising player on a 1-6 team. eese says it’s too bad the Giants can’t win the Super Bowl every year? How about assembling a competitiv­e team more often. There is no excuse for this season’s record on the GM’s part, no matter what part coach Ben McAdoo and the players have had.

That is probably why Reese sounded so unusually humble on Tuesday. He knows he miscalcula­ted. He knows he messed up. He knows Tuesday’s press conference may have been his last with the Giants.

 ?? ROBERT SABO DAILY NEWS ?? An offseason filled with high expectatio­ns leaves Giants fans all the more frustrated with GM Jerry Reese’s team after 1-6 start, .
ROBERT SABO DAILY NEWS An offseason filled with high expectatio­ns leaves Giants fans all the more frustrated with GM Jerry Reese’s team after 1-6 start, .
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