The Giants had better close on John Harbaugh now.
The organization’s desperation — evident in the Giants’ incessant leaks about how hard they are working to land the former Baltimore Ravens head coach — has created an enormous amount of pressure for them to land him.
The good news is their efforts convinced Harbaugh, 63, to begin his in-person team interviews with the Giants at their practice facility in East Rutherford, N.J.
Co-owner Steve Tisch’s private plane was tracked from Baltimore/Washington International Airport to New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport by content creator Doug Analytics, transporting a Super Bowl winning coach that the franchise is treating as nothing short of their long-awaited savior.
Then, the waiting began.
The Giants’ intent was to keep Harbaugh in the building until he agreed to become their next head coach. But the Atlanta Falcons, Tennessee Titans and Miami Dolphins all are very interested, too.
So there was a chance that Harbaugh would visit other teams before making a decision, and that possibility was making the Giants nervous on Wednesday.
They want Harbaugh so badly, there was even a possibility that the Giants would entertain a hard conversation about GM Joe Schoen’s future and about a new organizational structure in order to accommodate their preferred head coach.
Sources have told the Daily News all along that they believe Harbaugh would want Schoen out so he could replace him with his own GM or that he at least would significantly reduce Schoen’s influence.
That way the head coach would have final say over the GM, similar to the dynamic of coach Mike Vrabel and GM Eliot Wolf in New England.
The Giants prefer a structure of a GM aligned with ownership while coaches “come and go,” as Schoen infamously said on Black Monday. But hiring Harbaugh would require them to turn that blueprint on its head and relinquish control in some previously protected areas of the building.
Harbaugh also would not arrive without making significant changes throughout the building.
There are a lot of underperforming departments that have remained largely untouched that would no longer be safe from accountability.
The Giants should want wholesale change.
Since the start of the 2017 NFL season, Harbaugh has built a 95-54-0 (.637) regular season record in Baltimore and made six playoff appearances in those nine seasons.
In that same span, the Giants went 44-104-1 (.295), went to the playoffs once and fired four different coaches.
They have a thing or two to learn.
What the Giants do best right now, true to Schoen’s tenure, is leak information.
There is no team pumping more narratives and defenses and updates into the national conversation right now than the desperate Giants.
Their hope is that their actions ultimately will back up their words — and that they’ll land their primary target.
Because suddenly the coaching search that Schoen wanted everyone to know was sweeping, casting a wide net, is now all-in on one man only.
And the Giants have cornered themselves, with their own rhetoric, into having no choice but to go all out to hire him.
