Odell fiasco not over yet
The Giants’ locker room was quiet, empty and uneventful on Monday afternoon, which felt strange because it didn’t align with what was happening outside in the real world. Giant drama and dysfunction, thanks to Odell Beckham Jr.’s irresponsible recent interview, were the topic of seemingly every local and national sports talk show on Monday morning.
OBJ and Big Blue continue to take a beating for his critical comments on playing with Eli Manning, wasting away in the Giants offense, and playing in New York versus L.A.
The Giants (1-4) don’t have time, really, to dwell on the drama this week, with the struggling reigning Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles (2-3) visiting Thursday Night looking to stick a nail in their rival’s coffin.
Still, to simply look the other way and pretend this problem isn’t going to fester would be naive. One resilient effort in a loss in Carolina is nowhere near enough to prove this won’t linger.
We still don’t know if
Pat Shurmur took further action after hearing Beckham’s most damning comments that aired Sunday morning during the Giants’ warm-ups in Charlotte. This doesn’t just need to be dealt with; it must be squashed.
So Eli Manning mustered a joke Monday about whether he heard Beckham’s criticism.
“I don’t watch Lil Wayne that much (laughter),” the Giants QB quipped of the rapper who sat next to Beckham during the ESPN interview with Josina Anderson. “So, I missed a lot of them.”
Manning then turned serious and said it was important that Shurmur dealt with the situation and that Beckham addressed the team on Saturday night.
“Coach handled the situation well,” Manning said. “I think Odell — having him address the team and setting the record straight from his point-of-view — I think that was smart and big by him to get in that situation and kind of own up to what was going on and just kind of set the record straight so we can just avoid the distractions ... and just worry about playing football.”
And yet, what guarantee do the Giants have that Beckham won’t do this again? What is stopping him? What is stopping someone else?
Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young said in an insightful interview on The Michael Kay Show on ESPN Radio that the Giants need to create a culture in which actions such as Beckham’s interview make him the outsider. And in his mind that doesn’t exist here yet.
“Jerry (Rice) called me out a lot. He just didn’t do it publicly, right?” the threetime Super Bowl winning San Francisco 49ers QB said. “Almost every play he’d come back and tell me he was open. But that’s why the culture defines it. It’s like, it would be so odd, you wouldn’t say (something like Beckham did) because you would feel like the outcast in our locker room.
“You wouldn’t do it because you wouldn’t want to play the fool,” Young added. “That’s just how it would feel. And so it just doesn’t happen, and if it did, it would get fixed really quickly and it never got way out of whack.”
Young stressed that if the right group of leaders exists on a roster, “I don’t care what play is called, I don’t care what defense you run, you’re gonna be a really tough team to beat.
“And by definition,” he added, “when somebody is allowed to do (what Beckham did), and there’s no one to clean it up or to police it or to bring it in house or to figure it out or to quell it so that it’s not always happening, you just by definition don’t have that group. You don’t have a championship locker room.”
What’s interesting is that GM Dave Gettleman actively recruited players for this specific purpose this offseason, guys like Nate Solder, Alec Ogletree, Michael Thomas and Russell Shepard. So then are they using this as a moment to reset the culture? To reinforce this won’t fly?
Ogletree, a defensive captain, listened to Young’s criticism repeated to him and calmly told the Daily News: “Whatever (Young) did in his locker room, we’re gonna do what we need to do in this locker room to have a good culture, good working environment where everybody respects each other, and we go from there.”
Solder declined comment, but then he, Ogletree and Manning slipped out and ate dinner together in the cafeteria. Most players were gone by then, Beckham included.
Manning said he talked extensively with Beckham this weekend. “I talked to him a bunch Sunday before the game, and after the game, and today,” he said. “We’re always close, we’re tight, and we’re on good terms.”
But what matters more is what Manning, Ogletree and Solder were discussing at dinner. What matters is that they realize this drama is not behind them.