Joe Schoen's Giants appear to be treading water; will they sink or swim when season starts?
Giants GM Joe Schoen looks on during training camp at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center on July 30 in East Rutherford, N.J. Credit: Corey Sipkin
In case it’s been hard to tell at times, Joe Schoen made crystal clear the primary objective of his job as general manager of the Giants.
“(Head coach Brian Daboll) and I don’t approach this job without saying we want to go out and win,” he said, nodding just to his left where Daboll sat during their media availability on Wednesday. “That’s what we’re here for. That’s why we work our tails off…. That’s always going to be the goal. The goal is to win games. Always.”
Ironically, it may be some of those victories from last season that have thwarted the best efforts to put together a roster that might achieve that aim this season.
As the first rush of waiver claims went through this week, the Giants once again found themselves in a team-building no-man’s land, probably not good enough to contend with some of the powerhouse teams in the league (or even in their division) but not quite bad enough to really do anything about it with the tools allotted to the woeful also-rans in the name of NFL parity. With some easily identifiable holes on their current roster — cornerback, linebackers, offensive line depth — and 1,100 or so recently cut players available to them, the Giants put in just one waiver claim and added safety Anthony Johnson from the Packers.
The players the Giants could have used were out there. Of the 26 claims made around the league five of them were cornerbacks. The problem was that three of them went to the Panthers who had first dibs on everyone on the market. Schoen, who is good friends with Carolina general manager Dan Morgan, likely knew those players wouldn’t make it to his spot in the claim order and didn’t bother to push the useless paperwork on them.
“History says you can find some good football players during this time of year but we’re pretty thorough in our process identifying who may or may not help us, so there was one claim,” Schoen said.
Offensive line and linebacker? The Patriots, also ahead of the Giants in the chain of despair, claimed three of those players.
It’s a smaller-scale repeat of what happened to the Giants in the spring when they exerted so much effort into analyzing the incoming class of quarterbacks and we know (thanks to “Hard Knocks”) they found at least two they would have selected but wound up stymied by where they were slotted.
The Giants had the sixth overall pick thanks to their 6-11 record in 2023.
Yeah, Schoen must have thought at least a few times this offseason, thanks a lot!
That “magical” run by the undrafted rookie third-string quarterback that included wins over the Packers and Patriots and Commanders — two of them the teams that were in position to draft potential franchise-changing quarterbacks — when the season was already pretty much a lost cause? That last game of the year when they beat the Eagles just to say they did? Would the Giants have traded any one of those to have a better opportunity to contend this season?
But the goal was to win. And now it’s harder to do that.
This isn’t to say the Giants should have tanked. That will never be proposed in this space. But it does illustrate that victories aren’t always 100% pure. Some come with consequences. This whole offseason has felt like the Curse of the DeVito.
The Giants certainly knew they needed to make improvements in this last-ditch effort at adding wholesale personnel. It was just last week that assistant general manager Brandon Brown essentially promised that there would be a big turnover in the waiver process.
“We're always going to be aggressive,” Brown said. “Last year we were further down in the claim order, but going back to our first year, we were able to take those swings and get Fabian Monroe, Nick McCloud, get Jason Pinnock. We're going to do the same thing again…We're not going to apologize for trying to do that.”
Now it feels like they need to apologize for not trying to do it.
Schoen suggested he did think the Giants would make more than one measly claim.
“Sometimes it’s fantasy football,” he said. “(Sometimes you think) good football players are going to go out there and you are going to put in 15 claims across the league that are going to change your roster. But people aren’t cutting good football players.”
When they did this year, the Giants couldn’t reach them.
The Giants did improve their pool of players this offseason. They seem to have a star in the making with first-round pick Malik Nabers. They gave their defensive front a huge jolt with a trade for Brian Burns. They added good, experienced offensive linemen who even at their worst should be better than what they trotted out last season.
It was through nearly gritted teeth Schoen repeated several times on Wednesday that he “likes” the roster the Giants have. But he also said having the best roster isn’t always the key to success.
“Some of the best teams aren’t the most talented teams but they come together, they work hard, they know their assignments, they execute,” he said.
Maybe the Giants can be one of those. They sure were in 2022 when they made a playoff run. But looking up and down the list of players they have right now, it’s hard to see them as a squad whose skill and depth will carry them to where they want to be. Three years into his tenure and Schoen’s Giants are still relying on grit and luck to turn things around.
“Maybe around the trade deadline there is a chance to improve again,” Schoen said. “But I think most rosters are set.”
With a little over a week until the opener, this Giants team, for better or worse, seems to be one of those.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.