Big Blue has to Gett it done this season
These Giants are Gettleman’s vision, and it’s his job on line
This is what Giants co-owner John Mara, first among equals in the Giants ownership structure when it comes to the football operation, said this three weeks ago when asked if his general manager, Dave Gettleman, is on some kind of hot seat this season:
“We’re all on the hot seat, with our fans in particular. We’ve given them too many losing seasons. It’s time for us to start winning. But no, I wouldn’t say [Gettleman is on the hot seat]. I wouldn’t say that’s an accurate statement.”
Yeah, John, it is. And Gettleman is.
You can’t say that Gettleman’s problem with the Giants, where he is about to start his fourth season with hardly anything to show for it, is inexperience. He has all the experience in the world. Gettleman is 70 now, which means that the only general manager in the league older is Jerry Jones, and isn’t that working out great for the Cowboys.
If Dave Gettleman isn’t on the hot seat now, then when will he be? This isn’t Joe Judge’s team. This is Gettleman’s team. These are his guys on the offensive line. He is the one who took Andrew Thomas with the fourth pick in the draft, and took Daniel Jones with the No. 6 pick the year before the Chargers got Justin Herbert, who is going to be a star with the Chargers for the next 15 years, with the No. 6 pick. Everybody around the Giants knows how much Gettleman and everybody else loved Herbert. He decided to go back to college and the Giants chose not to wait for him and took Jones instead.
It is the same Daniel Jones about whom one general manager said this when the Giants drafted him:
“He will always be a good player. He will never be a great player.”
Now we’re not even sold on the first part. But Gettleman is tethered to him the way he is tethered to Saquon Barkley, coming back now from his knee exploding last season. It isn’t Gettleman’s fault that Barkley got hurt. And there is the chance that Barkley can once again look like the transformative talent that he looked like when he was at Penn State. But you know what can happen when you decide to take a running back with the No. 2 pick in the draft.
There sure have been times when running backs taken that high have gone on to have great careers in the NFL. But in this century, there were two other running backs besides Barkley taken with the second pick in an NFL draft. One was Ronnie Brown. The other was Reggie Bush.
Can the Giants make noise in the NFC East this season? Yeah, they can, you saw what the division looked like last season, when nobody ended up with a winning record. The Washington Football Team is banking on Ryan Fitzpatrick to win it the division again.
The Cowboys always think they’re still the class of the East, even though it is now a quarter-century since Jerry’s kids have been to the Super Bowl. The Eagles? Here’s where they are: Their best option at quarterback might be Gardner Minshew, for whom they just traded.
Here, though, is the enduring magic of every NFL season: Even the Eagles think they have a chance. Even they see themselves coming out of the blocks hot, and winning some games early that they’re not supposed to win, and away they go. So Giants fans can look at Week 1 and see the guys up front somehow protecting Daniel Jones against the pass rush of the Broncos, Jones staying upright and throwing the ball around. And away they go. They beat the Broncos and go beat the Washington Football Team and all of a sudden they’re 2-0 for the first time in what feels like about a hundred years.
Jones is playing like a young Eli. Barkley gets his legs underneath him and he’s a star running back, a combination of all the Earth, Wind and Fire things they had going for them once with Brandon Jacobs and Ahmad Bradshaw and Derrick Ward. That’s the dream, anyway.
But what is the reality of this Giants team, in the fourth year of what might turn out to be the last year of Gettleman’s term? I was talking to a football guy I trust on Friday (not one who has ever worked for either the Giants or Jets), one who knows the league and all the front office players, and asked him this question:
“How can Gettleman survive if the Giants are bad?”
And the guy said, “Let me ask you a question: How can they be good?”
There was a point, of course, after the Giants’ second Super Bowl victory over the Patriots when they weren’t back to being the biggest game in town. They looked like the class of the whole league. They looked like as much a model organization as the Steelers have always been. They weren’t the Patriots, nobody is the Patriots, there will never be another NFL dynasty like Belichick’s Patriots. But they had taken on the Patriots twice in Super Bowl and beat them twice, once when the Patriots were trying to be 19-0.
Now you see what has happened to them. Gettleman finally replaced Jerry Reese, who had replaced Ernie Accorsi, Mara clearly thinking he was getting another football lifer like Ernie in Gettleman. Ben McAdoo, treated like some kind of budding Bill Walsh, replaced Tom Coughlin and lasted a year-and-a-half and isn’t even coaching in the league now. Then came Pat Shurmur. Now Joe Judge.
But guess what? Right now, this minute, there is nothing to separate the Giants from the Jets. Their unproven talent at quarterback just has two more seasons of experience than the Jets’ kid, Zach Wilson. Over the past six seasons, under two regimes, the Jets are 33-63. They have had one winning seasons. Over the past six seasons, under front-office regimes, the Giants are two games better, 35-61. They have one winning season. Two coaches ago.
Now they clearly have a young coach, in Judge, in whom Mara and Steve Tisch have great belief. It is hard to see any scenario, any, in which Judge loses his job after this season. He is going to be around. Only how can anybody say that about the general manager? These offensive linemen didn’t pick themselves. Daniel Jones and Barkley didn’t draft themselves.
This is Gettleman’s vision, his show, his team. His job on the line.