Ex-Giants Defender Calls for Leadership Change After Giants Loss to Carolina

The Giants season hit its newest low with their eighth loss to Carolina and one former Giant turned radio host believes it's time for another shakeup.

Jul 24, 2024; East Rutherford, NJ, USA; New York Giants head coach Brian Dabol, left, and general manager Joe Schoen talks with media at Quest Diagnostics Training Facility. Mandatory Credit: Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images / Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

It's been quite a tumultuous 2024 season for the Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll regime in East Rutherford, and to some folks on the outside, their seats on the rollercoaster ride have never been hotter.

After surprise success in the first year of their partnership, which included nine wins, several of them in one-score affairs, and a postseason appearance and victory, all facets of their work have seemed to go in the completely opposite direction. The franchise has fallen in two seasons to a 2-8 record in its first ten games.

It looked as if Schoen had done everything he could to set the team up for an immediate and fiscally savvy operation in the offseason. He made the moves to part from pricey veterans Saquon Barkley and Xavier McKinney, who would have buried the cap, to build a roster with young talent at a cheaper rate and splurge the funds on a strong offensive line to protect quarterback Daniel Jones.

The results looked promising at the start, as the team got off to a 2-3 record and posted a couple of impressive wins on the road. But since then, the product has completely fallen apart. The Giants own one of the worst functioning rosters in the entire league, one that is averaging under 16 points per game and was run over on the ground in each of the last four weeks. 

Meanwhile, everything seems to be going extremely well for the players they moved on from last summer. Barkley, who gashed his former squads for 176 yards and a touchdown in Week 7, is building a potentially record-setting campaign in Philadelphia, and McKinney is leading the NFL in the interception battle, a stat for which the Giants defense has only managed one without his presence in the secondary. 

Sure, the duo have been able to unearth some promising pieces for the future on the other side, such as Tyrone Tracy and Malik Nabers on the offense and Andru Phillips and Tyler Nubin on the defensive end. Still, it hasn’t come together across the roster to make for a competitive product that only looked more bleak as both sides looked helpless in slowing down a mediocre Panthers team that handed them their darkest defeat in recent memory. 

It’s why, just two weeks after owner John Mara delivered an unwavering vote of confidence in his leaders and their vision for the future, it’s been hard to drown out the noise of calls for the dismissal of Scheon and Daboll, who are starting to fall out of favor with the New York market that once admired them. 

None of those is more poignant than former Giants Super Bowl-winning defensive tackle Chris Canty, now a co-host on ESPN's “UNSPORTSMANLIKE” radio show, who made his voice heard in calling for ownership to clean house.

“The Giants should fire everybody effective immediately,” Canty said on his program. 

“I know what (owner) John Mara said two weeks ago about not making any changes in season or after the season, but Sunday’s loss at Munich puts them on a five-game skid, and for the first time in 25 games they were actually the favorite.”

“At this point in the season, I know losses are like wins, so you’re not making a change for the sake of this season, rather it’s reckoning with the reality that the organization is rebuilding, and there is no sense in going through a rebuild where the head coach and general manager are both on the hot seat.”  

While Schoen and Daboll have had to battle questions all season regarding several players in their locker room, none have been more divisive and an argument against their jobs than Jones. The entire conversation started in the spring leading up to the 2023 season when they elected to bypass his fifth-year option and sign the quarterback to a long-term $160 million deal with a poison pill inserted after two years of service.

They thought getting Jones locked in for the long haul was a necessary move to supercharge what they thought would be a quicker rebuild based on the previous year’s success. Still, it wound up being their worst nightmare as the former No. 6 pick suffered a torn ACL in Week 9 and looked like a shell of the version that shined in the 2022 campaign.

Instead of going out and snagging a quarterback with their top-10 selection in last April’s draft, they elected to place their trust in their beleaguered gunslinger by pairing him with a No. 1 receiving option in Nabers to account for that hole in his huddle and the improved offensive line. Their intent hasn’t translated into reality, with Jones struggling to perform at the basic standard of the position and continuing to be thrown out there with the same results every Sunday. 

At times, he’s been criticized for his ability to get rid of the football when a receiver has broken free downfield or made the right reads on his first glance, but in others, his weapons haven’t held out their end of the bargain, dropping wide open passes, causing untimely turnovers, or offering lackluster effort and protection, as they have since Andrew Thomas’s season-ending foot injury. 

It’s begun to feel like the regime has been looking to distance themselves from the quarterback and put him under the spotlight, as his status as the starter remains in flux heading into the bye week. However, the attempt to use Jones as a human shield isn’t flying past those like Canty, who believes the team needs to look more inward than just the expensive face of their locker room. 

“Media and the fans want to blame Daniel Jones, the quarterback who did himself no favors on Sunday, but even though this regime didn’t draft him, Daniel Jones is their guy because they paid him,” Canty said. 

“There’s the quiet part that needs to be said out loud: they’ve already won with Daniel Jones. You can’t say you can’t win with Daniel Jones when he got to the playoffs, and he quite literally won a playoff game with this head coach and general manager. There is proof of concept.”

“What you’re saying is the head coach and general manager aren’t coaching well enough, they aren’t building the team well enough to maximize what you’re getting out of the quarterback who you’re investing $40 million a year in a long-term contract”

As the Giants enter their bye week, the circumstances are about as uncertain as they can get for the regime that seemed like they figured it out two years ago and would end the stream of poor seasons that have defined the organization since their last Super Bowl run over a decade ago. 

Schoen said in his presser that the Giants are “not far off” from their string of close contests, but to the traditional fan or football mind, close enough doesn’t cut it in this sport. It’s hard to back up that notion when the overall roster talent has weakened in the aftermath of the offseason, the systems are struggling, and the record on the books looks seven times worse than it did when he and Daboll took the reins. 

They’ve gone from having the consistent mindset of Daniel Jones as their quarterback, and they can win with the pieces placed around him to needing to evaluate everything from the first ten games to see how they could scavenge a couple more wins and their jobs with the clock ticking right over their shoulders. That evaluation has had several “missteps,” as Scheon also admitted, which leads one to wonder if it’ll be different when the new quarterback is likely selected in April. 

With seven games to go and a lot left to unpack, it seems like it would take a lot worse than Sunday’s loss to the Panthers for ownership to press the panic button and force their fifth regime change in the last decade. The reality is the needle is moving ever so quickly in that direction, and if the ship keeps sinking, we have seen how quickly John Mara reacts to pull it back out of the water with fresh captains. 

The Giants have been preaching patience and continue to do so as another campaign heads nowhere. For those like Canty, seeing a third year of that under the Schoen-Daboll era is enough for his eyes to turn their lonely gaze towards the next candidate. 

“That part alone should be good enough for John Mara to go back on his word and dismiss the general manager and head coach at the end of the season,” Canty said.  

“You got to hold somebody accountable for what we’re seeing from this team. They’re 2-8 in their first ten games with no signs of improvement. At some point, you have to realize where this franchise is. You’re about to go through yet another rebuild, and under this current circumstance, it’s warranted that you move on from Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen.”

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