Giants’ 2021 actions landed them in current cap crunch
NEW YORK — No NFL team should ever be in salary cap hell while picking in the top five of a draft.
Money is only supposed to run out on contenders who load up for Super Bowl runs, not on a 4-13 team tied for the league’s worst record since 2017 at 22-59.
But that’s where the Giants are, hamstrung in constructing their 2022 roster while other rebuilding teams like the Jaguars and Jets are free to spend away.
“If you’re that tight against the cap, usually you’ve either made a lot of mistakes or you’re among the better
teams in the league,” former Eagles president Joe Banner (1995-2012) said in a phone interview this week. “It tells you they made a lot of changes in the front office
for reasons that aren’t baseless.”
The Daily News spent the last two weeks asking executives, cap specialists and league sources in and around the Giants to explain the causes and severity of this predicament. The point is to understand how they created this dilemma so they
can avoid doing it again.
And here is what happened in 2021, according to those sources:
1) The Giants overestimated their chances of winning and overspent in free agency
2) They kicked money down the road by making exceptions to their contract philosophies
3) They incurred more than double their typical cost of injured player money
4) They didn’t follow through on some options to offset those costs
5) And they restructured nine players to delay cap charges that are hitting them now
The cumulative effect was adding around $15-to20 million onto this year’s 2022 salary cap that Giants brass hadn’t originally planned for.
Kevin Abrams, now the Giants’ senior VP of football operations and strategy, was ultimately the final signoff on all contracts and finances that went to ownership. The buck stopped with Abrams, then the assistant GM.
GM Dave Gettleman and head coach Joe Judge had visions and voices on what the 2021 team could be and what length of commitment the Giants needed to make to players. Ownership supported all of that.
New GM Joe Schoen is trying to show discipline now, with cuts and pay cuts and frugal spending. The idea is to weather shortterm pain in order to yield long-term salary cap health.
“If you take a blind look at the Giants as their new GM,” said Jason Fitzgerald, founder of the leading NFL cap website OvertheCap. com, “you’re just getting through the 2022 season and getting ready to reset the roster in 2023.”
Multiple league sources say the most recent comparison to Schoen’s current strategyishowHoustonGMNick Caserio managed the 2021 Texans: by signing veterans to cost-effective, one-year contracts to simultaneously compete on the field and avoid long-term commitments.
Ten of Schoen’s 12 outside free agent signings since March 11 have been one-year contracts.
Brandon Beane and Schoen did something similar with the Buffalo Bills in 2017. The Giants’ 2022 season will be difficult, but Schoen is doing it in the interest of 2023 and beyond.