NFL Insider Weighs in on Giants' Ownership's Dilemma Regarding Franchise's Direction

SI.com's Albert Breer believes it's becoming increasingly difficult for Giants ownership to maintain the current course with Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll.

Michael Lee | 11 Hours Ago

Dec 8, 2024; East Rutherford, New Jersey, USA; New York Giants co-owner John Mara watches warmups before a game against the New Orleans Saints at MetLife Stadium. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

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New York Giants

The New York Giants’ 2024 season can’t end fast enough for both the franchise and its long-time suffering fan base, which has watched the one-time jewel of the league deteriorate to what is shaping up to be a historically bad season.

But once the season ends, the Giants, who already face several questions about their future, will have to make a major decision regarding the team's leadership, specifically the general manager and head coach tandem of Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll.

With each passing and embarrassing loss, it becomes more difficult for team ownership to justify keeping the status quo although blowing everything up and starting from scratch would make the fifth head coach and the third general manager in less than a decade.

The dilemma facing team co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch, besides the aforementioned revolving door at the team’s top two football management positions, is that if they retain Schoen and Daboll, both men enter 2025 with their seats already on full-blast heat, as another poor season would necessitate the housecleaning that many are already calling for this offseason.

SI.com’s Albert Breer, in his latest MMQB column, states that Mara in particular, doesn’t want to start over from scratch, a sentiment that seems to be floating around 1925 Giants Drive.

However, as Breer also noted, the product that has been on the field lately has “looked disengaged and lifeless, and it’s been that way far too often since the Giants last won a game.”

That’s a rather damning development for Daboll, who, after the loss to Falcons on Sunday, was asked if he thought the locker room was still listening to him, to which he said he believed that was the case based on how the players came to work.

But again, as Breer noted, “the facts are the facts, and narratives have slowly become reality.” By bringing both back, Giants ownership would be placing both in an environment that leaves no room for error.

Mara, whose family has owned the team for all of its 100 years, has had two past instances in which patience paid off, particularly with a head coach: Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin. However, this year is different in that it’s not just the head coach catching heat but also the general manager.

Breer notes that Giants ownership needs to weigh the pros and cons of keeping Daboll and Schoen in their current roles.

A potential solution could be to stick with Schoen if ownership agrees that he’s started to put a solid young core in place and move on from Daboll so that when recruiting free agents this coming offseason, potential free agents don’t steer clear of the franchise because they see a potential lame duck head coach.

While the answer might seem easy to the scores of frustrated Giants fans who deserve a much better product than they’ve been given for most of the last decade, Mara has craved stability and has said that he realizes he needs to be patient with the process to where he can't go ripping things down every time things go off the rails.

That said, it's also fair to question just how "stable" the organization really is right now considering it's gone backward since 2022, the blame for which needs to be equally shared between Schoen and Daboll.