‘Things I think’: Woeful Giants have presented themselves with an opportunity

The New York Giants are officially the worst team in the NFL.

That might end up being the saving grace of this wretched, embarrassing season for a once proud franchise that has clearly lost its way.

The Giants’ one-sided, pathetically played 34-7 loss to the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday, combined with the Las Vegas Raiders’ 19-14 victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars leaves the Giants as the only two-win team in the NFL through 16 weeks of the 18-week season.

That means, of course, that the Giants currently have the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NFL draft. That is something no one can take away from them, unless they manage to win one of their final two games and perhaps end up taking it away from themselves.

Hitting that rock bottom for the first time since 1965, 50 years ago, might end up being the thing that finally provides the Giants a ticket to — potentially — end the disastrous path they have been on since they won the 2011 Super Bowl.

Of course, the Giants will have to do better with that No. 1 pick — if they manage to keep it — than they did 50 years ago. That year, the Giants selected running back Tucker Fredrickson with the first pick. Eventual Hall of Fame linebacker Dick Butkus and running back Gale Sayers went to the Chicago Bears with the third and fourth picks, respectively.

Fredrickson, with a career interrupted by a major knee injury, averaged 3.4 yards per carry over six middling NFL seasons. The Giants had only one winning season during his career.

The Giants are careening toward the opportunity to have their choice of quarterbacks to build around in the 2025 NFL Draft. They might be able to get the player they want without the No. 1 pick, but having it would guarantee they get the player they desire most.

I still don’t believe the Giants are intentionally tanking. If that was the case, why would Malik Nabers and Brian Burns, the best two players left on an injury-ravaged roster, be continuing to drag themselves to the field despite each dealing with a number of injuries? This team is simply bad. It simply isn’t capable of much more than what we see on a weekly basis.

The arguments that rage around the Giants media and the fan base are two-fold:

• Which quarterback is the right one? Is it Shedeur Sanders of Colorado? Cam Ward of Miami? Jalen Milroe of Alabama?
• Should Joe Schoen be the GM who gets to make the decision, and should Brian Daboll be the head coach who gets to try and make it work?

I don’t know what co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch will ultimately decide to do. They have three choices:

• Keep Schoen and Daboll. That’s a choice that probably means the duo gets to finish the entirety of their five-year contracts. The Giants can’t do what they Chicago Bears did to Caleb Williams and the Carolina Panthers to Bryce Young, drafting them No. 1 overall and then firing the coach (and in Carolina’s case the GM, too) before the quarterback’s rookie year was completed. They can’t do what they did to Daniel Jones, making him deal with multiple coaches, GMs and offensive coordinators.
• Keep Schoen, fire Daboll. This is the option that was floating around last week as being under consideration. I don’t know if it is or not. I know that when I think about it, I think that is the worst of the three options. Do that and the Giants are setting up a forced marriage with GM and coach on different timelines — and perhaps not working in unison. That was what the Giants had with Dave Gettleman and Joe Judge.
• Fire both and start over. This is what many fans want, including some going to the extreme of playing planes over MetLife Stadium. It would be easy for Giants ownership to choose this path. They could at least then sell the idea that they did something, and fans will feel like they got their pound of flesh.

This path would make sense as the Giants have embarrassed themselves in a year they were hoping to celebrate the history of one of the league’s original franchises and to restore some of the luster.

Instead of the 100th anniversary being a celebration, it has been a nightmare. ‘Hard Knocks’ is considered by most to have been an ill-advised misstep. The 100th year throwback uniforms were widely panned, and unlikely to ever be seen again. The product has been historically bad, with the longest single-season losing streak in franchise history and with a chance to be the first NFL team to go 0-9 at home.

What will the Giants do?

The hard path would be keeping Schoen and Daboll, letting them draft the quarterback they think can help them turn the franchise around, and giving them the two years remaining on their contracts to try and get it right.

You could argue that whoever the Giants bring in next, based on recent history, would have roughly a two-year window to get it right and would end up walking the plank themselves if they didn’t. In which case, staying with what they have might be the thing to do.

You could argue that blowing it up is the right thing to do. Letting the new quarterback start without a GM and coach who have a cloud hanging over them might be the smart play.

I argued way back when the Giants let Tom Coughlin go that the smart move then would have been to sweep out GM Jerry Reese and quarterback Eli Manning and rebuild. The Giants did not. That full clean slate approach is something the Giants haven’t done.

There has been constant change over the last decade, but never the three most important pieces at the same time. Bringing in Schoen and Daboll was close, but they were still handed (saddled with?) Daniel Jones.

The lack of discipline the Giants play with — they committed 10 more penalties, many of them pre-snap, on Sunday — the ineptitude of the offense, the inability to field a team that actually does anything well are all damning for Daboll.

The rash of poor personnel decisions, the mixed bag of draft and free agency results, the outstanding play in new homes of Saquon Barkley and others the GM did not bring back to the Giants are all damning for Schoen.

Yet, 2022 did happen. Schoen and Daboll took a rag-tag team that had gone 4-13 the year before to the playoffs and won a playoff game. That seems like a lifetime ago, and sinking to where the Giants are now seemed unfathomable at the time.

If you want to look at the bright side, and it is two days before Christmas so let’s do that, the Giants now may have an opportunity they haven’t had in 50 years. Yes, it is a ‘reward’ for a job poorly done, but it is still an opportunity.

Let’s see what they do with it.