INDIANAPOLIS — Joe Schoen announced in a surreal scene Tuesday at the NFL Combine that he is still the GM of the Giants.
“I’m still the general manager the team, and my role has not changed,” Schoen said. “I’m still tasked with leading the entire football operation.”
The only problem is Schoen had just said, 30 seconds earlier in the same press conference, that “we made reporting changes throughout the organization.” And one of them, he said was that “video and analytics report to Dawn” Aponte, the team’s new senior VP of football operations and strategy.
So wait. Which is it? The whole football operation reports to Schoen? Only some of it does? What a silly public relations fight for the Giants and Schoen to wage.
This is John Harbaugh‘s team now, and Schoen’s role absolutely has changed. The GM is still running the scouting staff, but the bulk of the Giants’ operation now reports to Aponte, and she reports to Harbaugh.
Schoen’s and the organization’s focus on combatting public perception about this reality, though, ironically is one of the reasons why Harbaugh is making these dramatic changes to the building’s reporting structure and personnel.
The Giants have undercut themselves for years by enabling or pushing personal agendas, allowing outsized influence in various hidden corners of the building, focusing more on public perception than the jobs they were hired to do and selectively assigning accountability to some while keeping it clear of others.
So Harbaugh’s explanation of why he hired Aponte on Tuesday was refreshing, encouraging and spot on for what the Giants need: someone who aligns the entire building under one set of expectations and points it in the same direction.
“It’s integration,” the $20 million-a-year coach said. “The thing that you come to understand over all these years, and it’s probably really true for any organization, that you’ve got to be aligned and you’ve got to be integrated, and everybody has got to be working together. There’s got to be a shared understanding, a vision of what you’re trying to accomplish.”
“That takes constant communication,” he continued. “It’s got to be flat. Everybody has got to be working together. The idea that there’s too much hierarchy or silos or separate fences and things like that, just can’t be a part of it. Not in football, not in anything. Someone like Dawn helps Joe and [me], the three of us really, working together to make sure that all of our systems are integrated.”
The Giants should not run from this, either.
They hired Harbaugh to revolutionize the way they operate and to win. They paid him like their new leader, and his final say over Schoen and direct report to co-owner John Mara makes him that, too.
This has been Schoen’s team the last four years. It is now Harbaugh’s. No one disputes that.
It is true Schoen still is technically the GM, though, and given that he is a survivor with sponsors at high levels of the organization, it is of course believable that he could be retained despite the Giants’ track record on his watch if he accepts this reduced role.
Harbaugh is also a leader. So even though he demonstrates the urge at times to make clear he is in charge, he recognizes that delegating and collaborating are inherent parts of running an organization and in empowering employees to contribute to the whole.
By the way, this arrangement could continue to evolve.
“I’m sure it will always be evolving for what’s best at any given time,” Harbaugh said. “We just organize it the way we organize it because we feel like it’s the best way to be effective.”
Schoen was asked directly if Aponte or he would be running the agent or free agent meetings at the NFL Combine, or if it will be done collaboratively. He did not assert that he would be leading those meetings himself.
Harbaugh’s heavy involvement in player scouting and in creating the draft board also, despite Schoen’s title, is another example of just how much change is coming to the Giants’ operation.
The head coach revealed that he has an office set up in his hotel room to watch college tape and see “all the prospects.” He doesn’t even go down to the Lucas Oil Stadium floor to watch player workouts because that film can be fed to his computer more efficiently.
How involved does Harbaugh intend to be in scouting and draft players compared to his role in Baltimore?
“I plan on being the same,” he said. “I was heavily involved there, and I’m heavily involved here. We always had an arrangement. It is truly a collaboration. So the term I came up with [Ravens Hall of Fame GM] Ozzie [Newsome] after we worked together for a couple years was we figured out how to agree to agree.
“So we’d have a lot of conversations about players, who we liked and didn’t like, who he wanted, who I wanted, how they ranked, who we might take and not take,” he said. “And Ozzie was picking the players, so sometimes I was making the case. But other times he was making the case to me because he didn’t want to take somebody that the coach didn’t want, that I didn’t want.”
Harbaugh said “that’s what we’ll be doing here.”
“I’ll watch a ton of guys on tape,” he said. “And I’ll have my opinions, and then we’ll work it out. And the two biggest opinions are going to be the GM and the head coach. Those are gonna be the two that matter the most. Those are the decision makers.”
Schoen, meanwhile, admitted he is behind in his normal schedule this year due to the coaching search and said Harbaugh’s personnel eye is impressive.
“He’s been involved in 18 drafts, so he knows what a third-round pick looks like, a second round,” he said. “He’s unique from that standpoint, that he can assign a value to the players. And he’s been pretty spot on from the evaluations he’s done thus far. And he’s very interested in the process. He’s watched several college players already. He got a jumpstart on that, which has been impressive.”
And the GM indicated that while Schoen and the scouts have created an initial draft board already, he expects Harbaugh to be involved in creating the final draft board in April.
“Once we get to April we’ll circle up as a group,” he said. “But the board as it’s constructed thus far — we’ve had two weeks of meetings in February — was me and the scouts. That’s already constructed. We call it get the players in the right zip code during that time of year. Then what else do we need to find out in the spring.
“[Then in April] we really drill down to hey if we have these three running backs in the second round, how do we want to stack them, and we do deep dives,” he added. “So I’m guessing coach will be a part of that process. But as the board is now, that was from the personnel staff and myself thus far.”
So there is acknowledgement that Harbaugh will be a heavy influence even in Schoen’s area. And, if push ever comes to shove, Harbaugh just happens to have the tiebreaking final say.
“Somedays I pinch myself, man, John Harbaugh’s our head coach,” Schoen said.
Those are the words of someone who feels fortunate to still be here — and is.
Here on the new version of the Giants. John Harbaugh’s Giants.
