John Mara is adamantly against tanking.
It is fair game to accuse the Giants‘ co-owner of many things. Tanking is not one of them.
When the Giants benched Eli Manning in 2017, Mara said it as clearly as ever:
“I read something somewhere about are we gonna tank the rest of the season? That’s complete bulls–t. I would never allow that,” Mara said seven years ago.
Mara is the chairman of the NFL Management Council executive committee. He sits on another committee literally titled the “Competition” Committee.
His father Wellington is his guiding light. So Mara above all believes in never insulting his fans and in never losing sight of that priority.
So in 2019, when Pat Shurmur’s 3-11 Giants only had to lose out to get the No. 2 overall pick, Mara’s team beat Washington in Week 16 anyway in a game that was dubbed The Chase Young Bowl.
The Giants slid down to the No. 4 overall pick and missed out on picking Young, the Ohio State pass rusher, at No. 2. They got franchise left tackle Andrew Thomas out of Georgia instead.
Not bad.
And now Young, as fate would have it, will be playing for the Saints (4-8) on Sunday against Mara’s Giants (2-10) at MetLife Stadium.
No one ever knows how the draft is going to work out. So Mara does not believe in losing on purpose to get a higher draft pick.
He hates losing. He believes in the integrity of the game.
He respects the players on his team enough not to let them put their bodies on the line for an intentional defeat.
He values the Giants’ fans too much to expect them to continue paying for regular embarrassments that they have to leave early.
He is too proud of his franchise’s 100 years of operation to let the legacy of Year 100 be that he tanked the end of the season for a higher draft pick.
Despite all of those facts, however, plenty of Giants fans still believe their team is trying to lose down the stretch on purpose.
Know why? Because it’s hard for them to make sense of the team on the field otherwise.
They assume that the Giants are trotting out a preseason game’s depth chart against the Saints on Sunday because they’re not invested in winning the game.
The reason they’re thinking this way is that it’s better than accepting the reality:
Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll did such a bad job these past three years that they are about to lose 12 straight to end the season and land the No. 1 overall pick by accident — not on purpose.
They have run such an uninspiring operation in 2024 that almost all of their notable players have either tapped out, disappeared from view after injury or, in Daniel Jones’ case, asked for their release.
Brian Burns, Darius Slayton, Jon Runyan Jr. and a handful of other veterans are, in the tongue-in-cheek words of one player, the “last men standing.”
Drew Lock is finally getting a full week to prepare as the Giants’ starting quarterback, after being skipped over by Daboll two games ago so Tommy DeVito could start a 30-7 blowout loss to the Bucs.
But now Malik Nabers is questionable with a hip flexor as his practice participation dipped during this frigid week.
It reflects poorly on Schoen and Daboll, to say the least, that they are changing their minds on which quarterback gives them the best chance to win this quickly. So why are they playing Lock?
Well, in addition to being the better quarterback, Lock has a better chance of putting up enough points to keep a final score looking respectable. His garbage-time TD at Dallas on Thanksgiving was a perfect example.
It’s optics. A 27-20 loss to the Cowboys looks a lot better on the stat sheet than the real score: 27-13.
Those optics games might fool outsiders, but Mara knows what the real score was on Thanksgiving.
Mara knows what it means to be a 5.5-point home underdog to a 4-8 team that already fired its head coach this season.
He knows the Giants have the worst team in the league.
In late October, while Mara’s vote of confidence in Schoen and Daboll seemed baseless, it was understandable from one point of view:
What was the Giants’ co-owner going to say?
He didn’t want to make a bad situation worse. He probably had an outside hope that his support of Schoen and Daboll would embolden and strengthen the team’s resolve and belief.
It’s obvious now, however, that it did not have that effect.
Mara stepping in to clarify and end the messy Jones situation before the quarterback’s was telling.
No one knows where the Tisch family stands right now. No one has heard from them publicly.
But Mara may not need any coaxing to make sweeping change if the stadium is empty on Sunday and the Giants get blown out by Bergen Catholic-product Darren Rizzi, Derek Carr and Alvin Kamara.
He said in October that he wouldn’t be making a change in-season and left the door open to a possible move after Week 18. The question now, though, seems to be if he can wait that long.
Because his team is so bad that many fans think the Giants are tanking. And that’s not it.
They’re just that bad.
FLOTT ADDED AS QUESTIONABLE
The Giants added corner Cor’Dale Flott (quad/knee) to the injury report as questionable. He joins a host of starters that will potentially be on the sidelines.
The team also made a series of moves to be able to field a team on Sunday:
They waived quarterback Tim Boyle. They played defensive tackle D.J. Davidson (shoulder) on injured reserve. They signed defensive tackles Casey Rogers and Elijah Garcia to the active roster off the practice squad. They elevated offensive tackle Tyre Phillips and corner Greg Stroman from the practice squad. And they claimed corner/returner Dee Williams off waivers from the Seattle Seahawks.