As the third roster-building season of Schoen’s tenure begins, let’s assess his work
Big Blue View’s resident scientist, Tony DelGenio, recently asked and, in his way, answered the question of whether or not Joe Schoen was a good general manager.
I can’t let Tony have all the fun weighing in on that topic. Schoen will be front and center for the next several weeks as he tries to upgrade the New York Giants roster in free agency and the NFL Draft. So, it’s a good time to talk about the work Schoen has done across his first two seasons.
Fortunately, sometimes Big Blue View readers help us along in our endeavors. Sometimes they don’t, but that is another story.
Recently, a reader sent a lengthy and well-thought-out question about Schoen that was intended for the Big Blue View mailbag. It requires a longer answer than the mailbag allows, though, so let’s get into it here. I think the answer reveals a lot of how I feel about the work Schoen has done — and still has to do.
Gregory Riley asks:
Now that we are entering Year 3 of the Joe Schoen Era how would you grade his performance for his first 2 seasons?
I would give him an overall C grade with the following good and bad things:
Good things:
1. Signed Andrew Thomas and Dex to long-term deals.
Ed says: Absolutely. Schoen gets an A+ for getting Andrew Thomas and Dexter Lawrence, two homegrown stars (thank you, Dave Gettleman) on a team that doesn’t have enough of those, to sign long-term deals. Especially for getting a Thomas deal done a year before he had to, and a year before it became an issue.
2. Signed Bobby O. In free agency.
Ed says: Another A+ move. You build a team through the draft and supplement it via free agency. You can’t take a lot of big swings, but when you do you want to be right far more often than you’re wrong. Eyebrows were raised by the four-year, $40 million deal the Giants gave Bobby Okereke, but he was everything they hoped for last year. Maybe more. Terrific player. A leader. Good in the locker room. Good with the media. An excellent representative of the franchise in the community. Couldn’t ask for more.
3. Drafted Kayvon and Wan’Dale in the 2022 draft and Banks in the 2023 draft.
Ed says: It is generally agreed upon by evaluators that it takes three seasons to fully judge a draft class. So the jury is out on all of Schoen’s picks, the good ones and the bad ones, in terms of what they will ultimately be as NFL players.
That said, no one should have complaints about Kayvon Thibodeaux. Is there room for growth? Yes, but don’t forget that this will be Thibodeaux’s age-23 season. He is still a young player. Deonte Banks looks like he will be a really good player. I still would have taken wide receiver George Pickens, who went No. 52 to the Pittsburgh Steelers, instead of Wan’Dale Robinson. I will acknowledge that my bias is toward the bigger receivers who can be 50-50 ball winners. That said, I like Robinson as a player and person and think we haven’t seen his best yet. Knowing Brian Daboll and what he likes, I understand the choice of Robinson instead of Pickens. Still don’t like it, but understand it.
4. Modernized the whole GM/scouting function from the Gettleman era.
Ed says: This was one of the complaints that you often heard about the Giants before Schoen came on board. They were antiquated in their thinking, in how they scouted, in how they ran their front office and it was costing them on the field.
Schoen has changed that. He hired a talented front office staff that included Brandon Brown, Dennis Hickey, and Ryan Cowden. He hired several new scouts. He and Brian Daboll have embraced data and the use of analytics. He oversaw the building of a new, modernized draft room that embraced technology. No more magnetic draft board, it’s all digitized now to smooth the process.
Not only that, Schoen does more in-person scouting than either of his predecessors.
5. Gave Giants fans hope of making playoffs in the first season at the helm.
Ed says: Hard to argue with that. Giants fans, and the Giants organization, needed hope. A playoff victory in the first year of the Schoen/Daboll regime certainly did that. The unfortunate flip side is that it likely raised expectations beyond a reasonable bar.
Bad things:
1. Signed Dimes to a four-year deal and tagged Saquon – should have been the reverse.
Ed says: I am going to push back on this one. Sometimes you make the right decision and it still ends up going sideways. In my view, that is what happened here. At least in 2023.
Schoen was clear from the first day of the 2023 offseason that he was going to prioritize quarterback over running back. I was clear from the beginning that I agreed with that priority. Quarterback is ALWAYS more important than running back.
Let me start here. The tag for Saquon Barkley was $10.091 million. The tag for quarterback in 2023 was $32.416 million. Tag Jones and the Giants almost certainly can’t sign Okereke. They probably can’t sign Thomas to that team-friendly long-term extension, either.
After the Giants’ first playoff appearance since 2016 and first playoff victory since the 2011 Super Bowl, did Schoen have a choice but to sign the quarterback who helped them accomplish those things? Would you have been happy if the Giants just let Jones walk, blew things up, and started Tyrod Taylor Week 1?
More importantly, would co-owner John Mara have been happy? Would he have allowed it? I don’t know how involved Mara was in the signing of Jones. I do know this — Mara has always been a believer in Jones and probably felt vindicated after the 2022 season. Schoen, under direct orders or not, absolutely knew that a year ago. My guess is he felt handcuffed by the unexpected success and the contract he gave Jones was the best compromise he could find, giving himself an out after two seasons if it didn’t work out.
I still believe the Giants made a good-faith effort to sign Barkley. They got so close I am surprised it didn’t get done. I also think Barkley will be extremely fortunate if he finds a deal this time around equal to or better than the $23 million guaranteed he left on the table a year ago.
2. Huge whiff on Evan Neal – should have picked Charles Cross instead.
Ed says: I am going to push back on this one, too. Neal has not played well. Cross has played better. I think we all have to acknowledge that. It’s obvious.
I think, though, that we have to go back to the draft and put this choice in context. There was a tremendous debate at the time about the order of the top three offensive tackles in that draft — Ickey Ekwonu, Neal, Cross. There was no consensus about which was OT1, OT2, or OT3. There was consensus that all three were worthy of being selected in the top 10.
That left the Giants choosing between Neal and Cross. There was a lot of chatter at the time that the Giants loved Cross. Maybe they did, but they turned out to love Neal more. Considering the circumstances, I understand that.
The Giants were looking for a right tackle. Cross was always a collegiate left tackle, and there was projection involved in how well he might transition to the right side. If there was a question about Cross, it involved his run blocking — critical on the right side. There was evidence that Neal could handle the right side since he spent a season at Alabama playing there. He was considered the most versatile of the top three tackles that year.
While there were some concerns about lunging and balance, few analysts thought Neal would struggle to this extent. Most thought this was an excellent pick for the Giants. To this point, it simply hasn’t worked out.
Here is my quibble with this pick. When he made the pick, Schoen was asked why. He said, and I will paraphrase because Carolina took Ekwonu. If that is an admission that Ekwonu, who has also been better than Neal over his first two seasons, was Schoen’s OT1 why didn’t he take Ekwonu with the fifth overall pick? Knowing the Panthers were taking a tackle, it’s likely that the Giants could have gotten Ekwonu at No. 5 and Kayvon Thibodeaux at No. 7. If a pass-rush needy team jumped to No. 6 for Thibodeaux, wide receivers Drake London (No. 8 to the Atlanta Falcons) and Garrett Wilson (No. 10 to the New York Jets) would have also been terrific choices at No. 7.
3. Should have resigned Julian Love last season. Negotiation botched.
Ed says: More pushback. Negotiation botched? Nonsense. Go back and read the reporting from The Athletic on how Love landed with the Seattle Seahawks. The Giants made Love an in-season offer worth more than what he took from the Seahawks. He said no, thinking he could find an offer of $10 million annually on the open market. When Love chose free agency, he presented the Seahawks’ offer to the Giants and they refused to match. The Giants had already given that two-year, $12 million deal to Darius Slayton so that money was off the table. Plus, they had cheap replacements on the roster in Jason Pinnock ($940,000 in 2023) and Dane Belton (870,000 base salary in 2023) that they felt good about. Pinnock played very well.
Love had his opportunity to stay with the Giants and did not take it. In my view, the play of Pinnock and Slayton makes the decision not to match the offer to Love look just fine.
4. Horrific job on O-line last year cutting Tyre Phillips and not resigning Jon Feliciano.
Ed says: This was easily the biggest screw-up of Schoen’s two seasons as GM. I questioned a lot of the roster decisions that were made last season. None more so than how the Giants approached the offensive line.
Now, that being said I had no issue with the planned starting lineup of Andrew Thomas at left tackle, Ben Bredeson or Josh Ezeudu at left guard, John Michael Schmitz at center, Mark Glowinski at right guard, and Evan Neal at right tackle.
My issues were with the depth or lack thereof. Also with the idea that the Giants did not settle on a starting lineup until they began Week 1 prep for the Dallas Cowboys. Oh, and sending Glowinski to Siberia after one bad game.
The latter two are likely coaching staff decisions. Schoen’s responsibility falls with the roster. Not ensuring that one of Feliciano and Nick Gates remained as depth was an issue. Feliciano likely would have stayed had the Giants not dithered so long he bailed when he got an offer from the San Francisco 49ers. Tyre Phillips should have been kept. If the coaching staff did not believe in Matt Peart, he should have been replaced by a backup left tackle the coaching staff would be willing to use. Asking Ezeudu, a backup guard, to play left tackle was never going to work. After not practicing at tackle all spring or summer, Ezeudu was set up to fail.
5. Hiring unproven, inexperienced, and combustible Brian Daboll as HC. He is better as an OC in my opinion.
Ed says: I am going to push back on that, as well. Daboll was the right hire for Schoen at the time. Shotgun marriages between coaches and general managers are often recipes for disaster, pitting one against the other in a ‘blame game’ if and when things don’t go right.
Say what you want about Gettleman, he never hired his own head coach. Ownership hired Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge. Shurmur, in my view, had no real vision. Judge had a vision. As we have learned since his firing, though, his vision and Gettleman’s vision were not the same.
A franchise can’t succeed when the coach and GM are not on the same page. At the risk of firing up the ‘Ed hates Jerry Reese and will blame him for anything’ crowd, I believe this was the undoing of the Reese-Tom Coughlin pairing. Reese wanted to move the roster in a direction Coughlin didn’t want to go, and it resulted in an ill-fitting roster with too many players who didn’t fit what Coughlin and his coaches were trying to do.
Schoen and Daboll had shared experiences in Buffalo. They had a shared vision. They had a pre-existing relationship and an obvious desire to work together. They are a pair. They work together to make decisions. They aren’t always going to agree, but they come from the same philosophical point of view, have the same shared vision, and are on the same timeline.
Those are all good things.
I still believe that if John Mara had gotten the candidate he favored for the job, Brian Flores would have been the Giants’ head coach for the past two seasons. Flores, for what it’s worth, is a good coach with a reputation for being hard to get along with. Sound familiar?
Daboll was Coach of the Year in 2022 for a reason. He did a great job and his team overachieved. In 2023, things did not go as well and we saw the frustration bring out Daboll’s emotional side — to his detriment.
We will see where things go from here. It is easy to make the Coughlin comparison to when Coughlin famously softened his approach toward players in 2007, leading to a pair of Super Bowl victories.
“We’re all going to learn and grow over time, and we have to,” Schoen said at the Combine.
We will see if Daboll can. I think it is wrong, though, to say that Schoen should not have hired Daboll as head coach.
Final thoughts
Overall, I think Schoen has done a lot of positive things. In the 2022 playoff season, a lot of the under-the-radar moves the Giants made to add players during the season helped them make the playoffs. He gets credit for those.
There were plenty of things I didn’t like about last season, and for which he deserves criticism.
Let’s remember that he is still working with major pieces of Gettleman’s roster, and was still dealing with dead money from the Gettleman era in 2023. He has made mistakes, no doubt about that. He has also done several good things.
The reality is that except for one season — an aberration, we now know — the Giants were terrible for a decade before Schoen was hired. It may have seemed like an easy fix when the Giants made the playoffs in the first year of Schoen’s regime, but it’s not. You don’t fix a decade of mistakes in one or two offseasons.
I would probably give Schoen a B or B- if I had to put a grade on his first two seasons. He has done a lot of positive things for the organization and has had some personnel hits. He’s had a couple of misses. He has also, in my view, made some correct decisions that simply have not worked out.
I am optimistic that Schoen is the right general manager for the Giants for the foreseeable future.
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