The Giants’ official statement on Brian Daboll’s firing contained a poison pill: Joe Schoen is staying on as the franchise’s GM.
The team quietly announced in the sixth paragraph of a story on Daboll’s firing that “Joe Schoen remains in his position as general manager and will lead the search for a new head coach.”
“We feel like Joe has assembled a good young nucleus of talent, and we look forward to its development,” co-owner John Mara said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the results over the past three years have not been what any of us want. We take full responsibility for those results and look forward to the kind of success our fans expect.”
Co-owner Steve Tisch added: “These are difficult decisions, and John and I do not take them lightly, but we feel like this is the right thing to do at this time and will allow us to move forward.”
It’s possible that the Giants (2-8) are only retaining Schoen at this time and that the team’s statement was not a commitment to Schoen for future seasons.
The announcement did not specifically state that Schoen will be here in 2026 or that he has received a contract extension or anything of the sort.
Still, the immediate takeaway is that Mara and Tisch place the “disappointing” results of the past “few” seasons on Daboll and not on Schoen.
They do not appear to see the connection between Schoen’s poor drafting, free agent failures, catastrophic decision to let Saquon Barkley walk and their 5-22 record since the start of the 2024 season.
They are no longer using the “collaborative” buzz word to describe Schoen and Daboll. That served its purpose back in 2022 and 2023 when they were busy trying to lump Joe Judge into Dave Gettleman’s negligence as a GM to put lipstick on their regime change to Schoen and Daboll.
Their decision to retain Schoen is not surprising, though, because this is exactly what happened in 2020.
The team fired head coach Pat Shurmur and retained Gettleman to arrange a forced marriage with Judge, then clung to Gettleman for two more years until he cost a second coach his job.
The Giants organization was enamored with Schoen when they hired him away from the Buffalo Bills in 2022 mainly because his processes internally were a clear upgrade from what they were used to. But anyone would have looked more competent compared to Gettleman.
That doesn’t make it sufficient to match the expectations of what the Giants franchise should be.
Schoen, a first-time GM, has been running a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operations, learning on the fly and adjusting his articulated plan to the team’s disappointing results.
He admitted to misevaluating the Giants’ roster going into 2023, which led to a 6-11 season. He thought Russell Wilson was still good.
He has tripped into good draft capital by continuing to lose, constantly, with a 20-40-1 record overall. That earns higher draft picks, which is how the Giants got players like Mailk Nabers and Abdul Carter.
But he has just been acquiring individual talents. He does not know how to build a team.
And his draft misses, starting with first rounders Evan Neal and Deonte Banks, have crippled the Giants’ ability to build.
Even the Jaxson Dart pick, although Schoen liked the quarterback from Ole Miss, was steered primarily by coach Brian Daboll during the pre-draft evaluation process.
Mara and Tisch said “we understand the frustrations of our fans,” but they obviously don’t if they think the fan base will be OK with Schoen staying on board.
People are smarter than that.
They know Schoen staying means little change is occurring. They know the injuries will continue with no adjustments to the training staff that continues to go untouched as head coaches get cycled in and out.
They know better than to think that Ben McAdoo, Shurmur, Judge and Daboll all were the problem while the people above them were supposedly free from blame.
