EQUIPMENT FAILURES

Reese, Mac just weren’t built to lead underachieving team in need of overhaul l

BE honest: If you were asked to predict the Giants’ record after 12 games and the only two options were 10-2 and 2-10, what would you have gone with?

All those saying 2-10, get out. You are not telling the truth.

How did the Giants get here, a team seemingly on the rise, a team now in need of what coowner John Mara calls “wholesale changes” and “a complete overhaul” after the firings of Ben McAdoo and Jerry Reese? The Giants won 11 games last season and may lose 14 games this season, representing one of the most staggering one-year declines in NFL history. There are no easy answers as to why this happened, but the most logical conclusion is the Gi- ants vastly overrated their roster and the ability of the 40-year-old McAdoo to navigate through adversity.

Clearly, Reese looked at the 2016 Giants and decided they were a few tweaks away from competing for a Super Bowl. The defense, he figured, was all set. The offense, he figured, needed some smart additions, and he procured them with a big receiver (Brandon Marshall), a blocking tight end (Rhett Ellison) and a pass-catching tight end (rookie first-round pick Evan Engram). Or so he thought.

The best talent evaluators can take a critical view even amid success. The Giants won 11 games despite averaging 19.4 points per game, 26th in the league in scoring. It was a pedestrian offense bailed out by Odell Beckham Jr. It is Reese’s greatest failing that he took a look at the 2016 offensive line and determined it was a developing unit capable of excellence in 2017. His trust in Ereck Flowers and Bobby Hart as the starting tackles was monumentally

wrong, and it cost him in a big way.

“We had pretty much the same offensive line last year, and even though our offense was not particularly good last year, it was good enough to win 11 games,” Mara said, pedaling false information. The offense was not good enough to win 11 games. The defense allowed the second-fewest points in the NFL. That is why the Giants won 11 games, carrying the offense along for the ride.

The demise of the defense, especially early in the season, is the real mystery. The battered and injury-riddled unit laboring to the finish cannot be counted on to perform at a high level. The defense was healthy enough at the start and did not live up to expectations, living off last year’s success far too often. There also is a leadership void on the defensive side of the ball, no universally respected veteran willing to take charge when needed.

McAdoo was hailed in his first season as innovative and intensely plugged into the millennial-generation players, pumping up the music in practice, emphasizing “empathy” and showing his team the movie “Detroit” to better understand race relations. McAdoo, though, did not let his guard down enough to practice what he preached.

He often said, “What do feelings have to do with it?’’ Dealing with young, needy players, feelings always have something to do with it. For a consummate pro, McAdoo is fine. For players rough around the edges as far as maturity and self-discipline, McAdoo needed to give more than he did, like it or not.

McAdoo told a confidant once he felt he needed to get the ball to Beckham 80 percent of the time to get the offense humming, realizing there was not enough balance. Beckham missed time early with a high ankle sprain, and once he was lost for thehe seasonseason, thethere was nothing to fall back on as Beckham’s magic could no longer conjure up points on demand.

The late-season avalanche of injuries only turned a bad situation into something worse. It did not ruin the season as much as it put it out of its misery. “It was the perfect storm,” Mara said. Perfect storms can be forecast. What befell the Giants could have been prevented with bold moves to make changes proactively to shake up a team too high on itself.

“I thought it was as talented a roster as we’ve had here in a long time,” Mara said. “We were coming off an 11-5 season, our defense was basically the same, our offense was supposed to be better. We were supposed to be better.”

That can stand as the motto of the 2017 Giants: They were supposed to be better.