GM Joe Schoen calls plays but wants to hear from others in Giants huddle
Giants head coach Brian Daboll, left, speaks to GM Joe Schoen during practice at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center on Jan. 19 in East Rutherford, N.J. Credit: Corey Sipkin
Newly acquired linebacker Boogie Basham credited Joe Schoen as the reason he was selected in the second round by the Bills two years ago in what wound up being Schoen’s final draft as their assistant general manager.
Schoen would have none of it.
He insisted that in the draft, particularly in the first three or so rounds, most of those calls are made organizationally. There is an entire consensus built, at least in healthy and functional front offices, between the scouts, coaches and sometimes even ownership and other departments in the building.
The same goes for free agency, trades and other personnel calls that teams find themselves making throughout the year.
“Those decisions are never on one person,” Schoen said.
It’s not him being bashful or unwilling to take a bow.
He truly believes in that philosophy.
It’s why even now — as he sits in the big chair for the Giants, entering his second regular season as the team’s general manager — he rarely makes a unilateral decision.
He has every right to. Heck, in less than a calendar year, he got the Giants to the playoffs for the first time in six years and watched them earn a postseason victory for the first time in 11. He’s earned the right to Vince McMahon-strut his way through the hallways of the building, rattling off decrees and orders to his underlings.
Instead, he acts more like an assistant. An assistant to everyone else.
What do you need? What do you want? What can I get for you?
It’s why when a player such as Basham or another linebacker the Giants recently traded for, Isaiah Simmons, becomes available, Schoen doesn’t have to do much thinking about whether they will fit with the Giants. And he certainly didn’t have to make that decision himself about Simmons. He already knew what was on defensive coordinator Wink Martindale’s shopping list.
All Schoen had to do was run the errand.
“It starts there between Dabes and myself, or his staff and my staff,” Schoen said. “From last year when we got here, they did a very good job of defining what they want at each position, which makes our job easier when we’re going to look for players. So I think it starts with communication. Year two, everybody’s on the same page. We’ve been through a season.
“If you need something as a coaching staff, come to us and we’ll go try to find it.”
That kind of symbiosis doesn’t exist everywhere in the NFL. It certainly didn’t for the Giants under their last regime, when the general manager and head coach barely spoke at all toward the depressing end of their tenures.
If there is one thing Schoen deserves the most credit for here, it isn’t the big contracts he’s meted out for Daniel Jones, Andrew Thomas and Dexter Lawrence, or the meager one with which he managed to get Saquon Barkley back on the team.
It’s not the draft picks or the free-agency signings or the trades.
It’s the palpable sense of teamwork he has brought to the organization.
Even in this past spring’s draft, when the Giants traded up to get wide receiver Jalin Hyatt, it wasn’t Schoen who made the call to the Rams. He deputized Daboll to do it.
And when the Giants selected Tre Hawkins III in the sixth round out of Old Dominion, a player who probably will become a surprise starter for them as a rookie next week, it wasn’t because they saw something that other teams didn’t. It was because he fit their well-communicated requirements.
“Wink is very particular of what plays in the system and what’s at a premium,” assistant general manager Brandon Brown said. “We know, hey, you’ve got to be able to run, got to be strong, guys that have length and you’ve got to be willing to be physical in the run game and also in press coverage . . . It was just a matter of marrying the development from the coaching staff to having game-day traits.”
Hawkins fit that description. It was an easy pick.
Although Schoen and Daboll came to the Giants together from Buffalo, walking step for step with their vision for their new team, it took some time for their philosophies to filter throughout the organization.
“I think year one, it’s very time-consuming implementing your process and making sure everything’s being done the way you want it to be done,” Schoen said. “I don’t want to say you have to micromanage, but every step of the process is new.”
This year?
“I’d say it was a well-oiled machine,” Schoen said. “People knew expectations, they knew their job responsibilities, they knew the process, so it was much smoother. That freed me up to do some other things that maybe I got bogged down with and couldn’t last year. That was the biggest difference.”
It’s also the biggest impact Schoen has made on the Giants . . . even if by its very nature, it requires him to refuse the credit for it.
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.
