Looking back, Odell deal still a mistake

The Giants’ leading receiver had 39 yards last week in a near shutout loss to the Cardinals. Big Blue averages a paltry 18.3 points per game, ranking 31st in a 32-team league. Yet there are critics claiming the Giants won the Odell Beckham trade with the Browns.

Message to the critics: the mask goes over your nose and mouth — not your eyes.

Giants GM Dave Gettleman cut off his nose to spite his face when he traded Beckham in March 2019. Any revisionist history to make this appear prudent must have its genesis in some hidden agenda.

Giants head coach Joe Judge is coaching around his offense’s personnel limitations this season. He’s using an improved defense, a clock-eating run game, and special teams to keep low scoring games close in the hopes of winning.

Gettleman knew the offense needed a receiving threat to replace Beckham when he traded him. That is why he gave Golden Tate the moon in free agency. And that was a bad signing not only in hindsight but the day that it happened, as well.

Giants quarterback Daniel Jones and Beckham might have formed an explosive big-play duo that could have helped the young QB develop quicker and score enough points to make this team consistently competitive.

Instead, Gettleman traded Beckham — whose good always outweighed his bad — at a discount of the original price he had been seeking in the Giants’ first conversations with teams going back to the spring of 2018.

And here is what Gettleman got back in return: A rotational interior defensive lineman who doesn’t consistently rush the passer in Dexter Lawrence; a hybrid safety/linebacker who had a bad 2019 season and is only now making some positive impact in Jabrill Peppers; and a pass rusher who looks like a backup in Oshane Ximines.

The Giants went 4-12 in their first season without Beckham. They fired Pat Shurmur because of how poorly the team and offense performed in the first season sans OBJ.

Of course, Beckham has sustained injuries in Cleveland since the trade that have kept him off the field for a fair amount of time. And he had his share of injuries with the Giants, too.

But the idea that the Giants always believed Beckham never would stay healthy is preposterous.

If that were true, then the five-year, $90 million extension they gave him in August 2018 looks even more ridiculous and ill-advised — and it’s hard for it to look any worse, giving Beckham that money just months before trading him and eating millions in dead money to do it.

Again spare me the revisionist history. Giants players were upset about the trade. Beckham is one of the most talented players in this franchise’s history.

Even Peppers said Friday that as a Cleveland Brown in March 2019, he was thrilled when he heard his team was getting Beckham — until Peppers heard he was going the other way in the deal.

“I was at home. I was on Twitter. And I (saw) it,” Peppers said. “I was actually excited about the trade. I’m thinking, ‘S--t, we just got Odell!’ I keep looking and I’m like, ‘Oh s--t. I’m like ‘Man!’”

Players respect and revere Beckham’s talent that much.

Good teams don’t trade great players. And if they do, they only do it for maximum return to put the organization in a better place. Gettleman sold Beckham at a discount price.

Shipping OBJ was directly related to his refusal to play ball with the organization’s enabling of Eli Manning’s deterioration at the end of his career. Beckham was shocked by the trade but didn’t mind a fresh start, either.

What Beckham did not anticipate, however, was that playing with Baker Mayfield would show him how much better he had it with Manning, Ben McAdoo and Shurmur, even when the twotime Super Bowl QB wasn’t the same.

When Beckham was a Giant, his coaches and quarterback knew he was great and that they needed to get him the ball. In Cleveland, though, Mayfield is limited. He does not see well downfield or out of the pocket. And those shortcomings have negatively affected Beckham’s performance with the Browns.

Mayfield never seemed as comfortable sharing the spotlight with Beckham as he does now with OBJ sidelined and out of the picture, either.

Now the Giants are 9-21 since the Beckham trade, and we are supposed to believe the organization is better off.

The infamous boat trip prior to the blowout Wild Card playoff loss in Green Bay of course was an enormous mistake. But Beckham doesn’t deserve all the heat for that, either.

As the years went on, Beckham became a victim of the Giants’ organizational mismanagement and refusal to move away from Manning. iants fans prefer not to relive the bad history, but when critics try to revise history with the intent of airbrushing legacies and burying an individual for the sake of a billion dollar company, it’s time to rehash the facts.

G