John Mara isn’t worrying about drones in the air, the way so many Americans are these days. He’s far more concerned about these planes flying over MetLife Stadium, with a messages out of the past about lousy football. The first plane like that, nearly a half-century ago, flew high over old Giants Stadium, and over what we thought was the lowest point in the team’s history. But what we are witnessing now is worse, the single lowest point in the 100 year history of a once-proud franchise.
It is why the next NFL draft, next April, is as important as any other in the team’s long and occasionally storied history.
There have been other drafts that mattered, and a lot, for the Giants. There was the one that brought them Frank Gifford in the 1950s. There were two nearly three decades later, one where George Young drafted Phil Simms (1979) and another when he took Lawrence Taylor second overall (1981), big ones that helped put the Giants back on top for the first time since the ’50s.
And then there was the 2004 draft, the one that changed the history of this century for the Giants; the one where Ernie Accorsi made one of the greatest transactions in the history of New York sports, the draft day trade with the Chargers that won the Giants Eli Manning and eventually won them two Super Bowls, the first of which, against the 18-0 Patriots, John Mara called “the greatest victory in the history of this franchise.”
Now comes a season like this, one that makes Eli’s second Super Bowl team in Indianapolis, thirteen years ago this February, seem like it happened 100 years ago, when the Giants were still playing a New England team like the Providence Steam Roller. So now the question Mara has to ask himself is this:
Does he believe Joe Schoen is the right man to make the decisions to get the Giants out of this, and not just about who the next quarterback is going to be?
“It’s never just about getting yourself into position to make the pick,” Accorsi told me one time. “Then you have to decide whether there’s someone you truly believe can be a championship quarterback, which I believe with Eli after practically stalking him for two years. Of if there’s the kind of life changer that George [Young] was convinced LT was when George went for him.”
These are questions Giants have to answer over the next five months. Do Mara, and Schoen — if Schoen keeps his job — believe that Shedeur Sanders is a franchise-altering, or at least franchise-saving, quarterback? Do they think Cam Ward, the kid from Miami, can be the same thing? And if they don’t, if this is a draft that doesn’t have a Jayden Daniels, or a C.J. Stroud, up there at the top of everybody’s boards, do the people in charge of the Giants have the discipline, in light of everything that has happened over the past couple of seasons, to be sound with another kind of No. 1 pick, and all the picks that will follow?
I was talking to a league front-office executive on Wednesday, one without any skin in this particular game, who put it this way:
“No matter how you look at it, [John Mara] is in a brutal situation.”
He is, and he has to take his share of the blame for it, this brutal situation for him and his football team. Joe Schoen has clearly been no star as a personnel guy, or even close; honestly, he has been mediocre at best, and not just because he was part of the decision to give Daniel Jones that contract a couple of years ago because he won a single playoff game. Schoen’s best work, from football people to whom I’ve spoken, has been reshaping and restructuring the Giants front office. But if Mara blows him up, a lot of that gets blown up, and the Giants have to start all over again.
Again.
Schoen has been wrong about a lot. But this isn’t all his fault. Everyone associated with the Giants should have their heads examined for agreeing to give “Hard Knocks” the kind of access the show had, the way they were allowed to eavesdrop on therapy sessions with Schoen and Mara. But it was Mara who hired Dave Gettleman, and Ben McAdoo, and Pat Shurmur, and Joe Judge, the worst coaching hire the team has made since Ray Handley, Mara somehow convinced himself that in Judge he had found Bill Belichick on training wheels. Right before the wheels came off in Jersey again.
So here we are, and the only reason the Jets aren’t the biggest football joke over in the Meadowlands is because it’s Giants fans hiring those planes, and Giants fans — a legendary and passionate group for all times around here — showing up with paper bags on their heads. We keep hearing that the Giants at least are still showing some fight, as if that is where the bar is set now for a team that has won four Super Bowls over the past four decades, as if we’re now handing out participation trophies to the Giants now that the Lombardi Trophy is no longer in play, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Now 2025 is staring them in the face, as they play out the string in as dreary and depressing season as they’ve played all the way back to 1925. And when this season ends, the real season begins for management, everything that will happen once they finish out against the Eagles on Jan. 5.
John Mara will decide to keep Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll, or he won’t. But it needs to be for a better reason than him not wanting more change. It has to be because he sincerely believes they are the ones, the general manager especially, to get them out of this brutal situation.
But are they?