Giants need to resolve Beckham mess sooner rather than later

NEW YORK — For Pat Shurmur’s sake, the Giants need to resolve this Odell Beckham Jr. situation now.

The day before the Giants introduced Shurmur as the 18th head coach in franchise history, I wrote that the best way to welcome Shurmur would be to sign Odell Beckham Jr. to a long-term contract extension so Shurmur could announce it right there on stage in East Rutherford on the morning of Jan. 26.

This of course wasn’t realistic that day because the Giants always were going to wait to see if Beckham’s left ankle was healed before paying him megabucks. But the point was this:

For the Giants to give their new coach an optimal working environment to turn this franchise around, they needed to take care of their star player’s situation before it escalated into a distraction threatening the stability of Shurmur’s start to what’s supposed to be a new era in Giants football.

And yet here we are, approaching April with the Giants potentially on the verge of trading Beckham, opposing GMs leaking the Giants’ asking price, OBJ threatening a holdout without a new deal, and negotiations between the Giants and Beckham’s team only “at the earliest, most premature stages,” per coowner Steve Tisch on Monday. All of this is to say, if the Giants intend to trade Beckham, they should trade him. If they reverse course and decide they’d rather pull him off the market and just pay him, they should stop taking calls and pay him.

But if they leave this unresolved into April 9, the start of the Giants’ offseason workout schedule and a day that both Shurmur and players are scheduled to meet the media, then the circus will be back in North Jersey:

Beckham will be the biggest story every day, whether he shows up or not. There will be the potential every day Shurmur coaches his new players of a story leaking about a new asking price or offer the Giants are entertaining from other GMs for OBJ.

There will be Beckham’s first opportunity to speak for himself about his infamous viral video, about how he feels seeing the Giants consider trading him, about his desire for a major contract, and about his frustration that a deal isn’t done, to name just a few of the obvious topics.

The deadline for the Giants to make a decision here, in other words, might not be the start of the NFL draft on the night of April 26; there is a strong argument that it’s April 9.

Unless Dave Gettleman didn’t mean what he said Tuesday that “a big part of my responsibility” is “eliminating those distractions to allow coaches to coach and players to play.” He would be failing Shurmur and his job description by letting this drag on.

A large part of me believes, though, that Gettleman wants to resolve this as quickly as anyone.

Think about it: Gettleman is 67 years old. He has wanted this job his whole life, and he has waited nearly that long to get it. He’s worked 30 years in the league, including from 1998-2012 as a personnel executive for the Giants and from 2013-16 as the Carolina Panthers’ GM, before finally getting the call to the big seat running Big Blue.

I would be shocked, as Gettleman lays the groundwork to hopefully stabilize the Giants and leave a legacy of turning around the proud franchise, that the general manager would allow Beckham’s situation to derail all of that just four months into Gettleman’s tenure, before his version of a Giants team even has played a game.

Shurmur, of course, is an offensive head coach who would love nothing more than to coach a player as talented as Beckham.

So Shurmur no doubt hopes — as he understood after meeting Beckham in California last week — that OBJ still intends to show up in East Rutherford on April 9.

Whatever Gettleman and the Giants decide, however, they must do it soon. When Shurmur’s Giants open offseason workouts on April 9, the conversation needs to be about football and nothing else. And unless the Giants sign or trade Beckham prior, it will be about OBJ and everything else.

Beckham