Reality or TV? Time to gauge skill of Big Blue brass
MAYBE this means nothing. It’s reality television, after all. I’m not sure anyone sprints right out to a restaurant simply because Gordon Ramsey has gone all Bobby Knight on some poor sous-chef. A lot of the drive-ins, diners and dives Guy Fieri visits might make our mouths water, but if you visit too many of them, you’re probably going to need to carry gallon jugs of readymade Alka-Seltzer with you.
So yes, the peek behind the curtain we’ve gotten with the Giants the past few weeks on HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” enjoyable as its been, probably doesn’t translate to the kind of regular-season (and beyond) success Giants fans crave. All we need to do is remember how many hours of last summer we spent watching the life and times of Aaron Rodgers, and all of that yielded four plays from scrimmage.
And it’s true, we might be just as impressed if we got to hang out in Brett Veach’s office in Kansas City, or in Brandon Beane’s office in Buffalo, or in John Lynch’s office in San Francisco. You don’t become a general manager in the NFL without being the quickest-thinking guy in most rooms you walk into.
Even the bad ones are pretty damn smart, and organized, and energized.
So maybe we shouldn’t award Joe Schoen a bowl of ice cream for the way he’s presented himself on TV. Maybe we should wait until we get an eyeful of the team he’s assembled this year, and of the plan he’s crafted for the next couple of years. Fair enough.
Still, you can’t be a Giants fan and not be at least somewhat impressed by what you’ve seen so far in this rare look at the innerworkings of coordinator hiring, free-agent planning and rookie drafting. Some don’t agree. Veteran football impresario Michael Lombardi went chapter and verse on that last week, as did others. Fair enough.
Still, to these eyes, the Giants seem to be in good hands by what we see on camera. Schoen comes across well. So does Brian Daboll, who made like a football Will Hunting as he was interrogating quarterback prospects and provided a stark reminder how little laymen really know about what goes into competent NFL quarterbacking. New defensive coordinator Shane Bowen also makes a good first impression.
Starting this week, as the Giants kick off training camp for their 100th season, we’ll start to see if it’s all just TV magic or the real thing.
“We always have room to grow and always have room to improve,” Schoen said in April, the day after the draft ended. “I say it all the time: We don’t play until September, so there’s still time between now and September where we can acquire players, the final cutdown, whatever it may be. I like the group that we have right now.” In truth, there are things to like. The defensive Big Three of newcomer Brian Burns, Dexter Lawrence and Kayvon Thibodeaux is the kind of trio that can get you dreaming of cold afternoons in the Meadowlands even as the mercury hits 98. Rookie wide receiver Malik Nabers seems to have more than a passing on-field resemblance to another LSU Tiger who passed this way not long ago. Daboll? He had a tough year last year. But this time last year he was fending off comparisons to the young Parcells after how well his first season went. He’s probably somewhere between Parcells and Pardee, and we’ll find out more about him this year, but it’s important not to simply dismiss 2022 given how brutal 2023 was.
So that’s the good. The bad is the division, which still looks too deep for the Giants to conquer given their roster, and the schedule, and the fact that this is still very much the rebuilding phase of the program. The offensive line has been strengthened thanks to Jon Runyan Jr. and Jermaine Eluemunor, and because it’s hard to fathom it could ever be as bad as last year.
Then there’s the vast unknown. Daniel Jones will be ready to resume his role as QB1, and like Daboll, he will have to declare if he’s closer to the guy who felt like a legit breakout star two years ago or the regressive Jones who was mostly ineffective last season before getting blown up. It was a $160 million question last year, and is now only a $120 million question, because the first quarter of it has been knocked off.
If this were a real “Hard Knocks,” it would mostly be the Daniel Jones Show, but it’s not, so we’ll slowly get our read on where Jones is and what he can be. Starting this week, he’ll start to tell us. They all will. And we’ll all begin to ask when we’re done watching any TV show:
How much of that was real?