SAD SACK MACBANS JENKINS
AWOL defender suspended indefinitely as it’s clear McAdoo has lost control
Ben McAdoo has to be coaching for his and Jerry Reese’s jobs the second half of this season after a second top defensive back in three weeks drew a suspension Tuesday for disrespecting the coach. There are two ways to look at McAdoo’s suspension of Janoris Jenkins, which was announced two minutes before the NFL’s trade deadline while other teams, like the Philadelphia Eagles, were busy making trades and getting better.
One is to commend McAdoo for penalizing one of his best players for breaking the rules and trying to maintain a sense of order on his 1-6 team. And Jenkins did break the rules. He took McAdoo’s “get away from it” bye week directive much too literally, not showing up for Monday’s practice — the day after his 29th birthday, by the way — and not even speaking with his coach until Tuesday morning.
The other way to interpret Jenkins’ indefinite suspension, though, feels closer to the truth: McAdoo’s need to suspend his top corner, despite Jenkins being at fault, is simply further proof this head coach has lost a percentage of his players, specifically his secondary.
Jenkins, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Eli Apple are McAdoo’s three best defensive backs. And in the past 25 days, Apple complained about McAdoo’s “culture,” Rodgers-Cromartie was suspended in Week 6 for walking out of the facility on McAdoo, and now Jenkins isn’t even bothering to show up for work or alert his coach why.
It might be an easy solution for Reese to ship one malcontent player out in a trade if this type of disrespect of McAdoo were an isolated incident. It is not.
And though there are players such as middle linebacker B.J. Goodson who have spoken up in support of McAdoo’s leadership, Reese’s recent comments that the players, specifically the defense, weren’t “hungry” enough this season — and McAdoo’s acknowledgement that it could be accurate — can’t be sitting well with a lot of Giants.
Imagine being Jenkins, one of the main reasons the Giants went 11-5 last season with a bad offense. And imagine hearing about how you weren’t hungry enough this year, as Reese’s unimproved offense continued to flop around like a dying fish on the deck of a ship, while you were clamping down receivers on the outside, often playing through injuries.
Does it excuse Jenkins’ not showing up for work? No. Are there reasons for Jenkins and other players to be upset with the “culture,” as Apple called it? Definitely.
McAdoo only decided to begin disciplining players AFTER Odell Beckham Jr.’s dog-peeing touchdown celebration in Philadelphia in Week 3. But the coach didn’t punish Beckham, nor did he even
condemn his wide receiver’s disgusting behavior until co-owner John Mara finally made a statement days later.
Instead, he applied his new rules spurred by Beckham’s recklessness to his secondary, for outbursts in practice and on the sidelines in Week 5, and some players began to wonder where this new sheriff in town had been when Beckham was punching a hole in the wall in Green Bay last year, or when Ereck Flowers was shoving a reporter last regular season.
The truth is McAdoo’s arrogance, his ‘because I said so’ attitude, is transparent. And while it characterizes many NFL personalities, some of them successful, it is unbecoming of a 40-year-old newbie who has accomplished little and whose inconsistency in discipline and inability to properly convey an accurate message publicly reflect insecurity and inadequacy at basic requirements of his job.
McAdoo understandably was in a tricky predicament on Monday when he hadn’t even heard from Jenkins by the time he stepped to the microphone. He prefers to handle discipline in-house, not to publicize it.
However, grouping the three absentees Jenkins, Apple and Paul Perkins all into the same category of “excused for personal reasons” was disingenuous at best.
First, it wasn’t true. Jenkins couldn’t be excused for a reason McAdoo didn’t know. And second, McAdoo unwittingly grouped Apple and Perkins into the same category as Jenkins. So on Tuesday when Jenkins’ status went from “excused for personal reasons” to “suspended indefinitely for violation of team rules,” it was natural to wonder if Apple’s and Perkins’ statuses were about to change, too.
The best we can tell now, though, Apple and Perkins actually had excuses and communicated with the team. So how could the coach possibly group them with a player who hadn’t even checked in? It’s lunacy and it’s not fair to Apple and
Perkins.
There still seemed to be friction between Rodgers-Cromartie and McAdoo, meanwhile, even before last weekend’s bye. McAdoo barely played the veteran in his first game back, and then the coach denied postgame that it was discipline-related, only to see Rodgers-Cromartie contradict the coach in the locker room and say his limited action most certainly was related to his suspension.
Owners John Mara and Steve Tisch have to be watching this wondering why so many players have such little regard for the coach they’ve put in place, and what they should do about it.
Knowing the Giants, if McAdoo is able to scrape together four wins in these final nine games and finish 5-11, the coach and Reese would rationalize to protect their jobs that a few wins in close early games basically would have put them at .500.
The problem is, four wins in these last nine are hard to find with a Giants offense that has scored two total touchdowns the last two games and amassed 177 total yards of offense in Week 7.
The Week 10 visit to San Francisco felt like the one gimme, but now that could be Jimmy Garoppolo’s first start for the 49ers, and it suddenly has become an unknown. And if this Giants team keeps slipping toward a 2- or 3-win season, Jenkins probably won’t be the last one suspended, and McAdoo and Reese probably won’t be here by Jan. 1.