The sins of Jerry Reese are visited upon Joe Schoen

I don’t think Moses, said to be the writer of the Book of Deuteronomy, was a football fan, but if he was he would have understood the situation that Joe Schoen inherited when he became general manager of the New York Giants. The Giants haven’t been wandering in the desert for 40 years (yet), it only seems that way. Dave Gettleman turned out to be a false prophet. Schoen came in and, with head coach Brian Daboll, proclaimed a sign or wonder that came true…for one season. Now the question is whether they are false prophets as well.

Most of the focus on the Schoen-Daboll tenure involves the players they have brought in, and rightly so. Sometimes fans lament the lack of talent left to them by Gettleman, and rightly so for that too, although Gettleman did bequeath them Dexter Lawrence and Andrew Thomas. But even all these years later, the influence of the Jerry Reese era still makes itself felt in the Giants’ never-ending quest to reach the promised land of being a consistently competitive team that occasionally wins it all.

With the departure of Saquon Barkley, the Giants currently have zero players on their roster from drafts earlier than 2019. At the end of 2023 they had one, Justin Pugh, who came back under emergency circumstances when the offensive line was effectively nonexistent and whose 2024 status is undetermined. They did have some veterans who entered the league with other teams, but only a few who were key players.

It wasn’t all Reese’s fault. He drafted some good players after the Giants’ last Super Bowl: David Wilson, Johnathan Hankins, Odell Beckham Jr., Weston Richburg, Landon Collins, Sterling Shepard, Dalvin Tomlinson. Injuries prevented a couple of those from reaching their potential or maintaining it. There were too many outright failures high in the draft, though (Rueben Randle, Damontre Moore, Owa Odighizuwa, Ereck Flowers, Eli Apple, Darian Thompson). Compounded by the mistakes of the Gettleman era, Schoen entered to find a pretty bare cupboard.

It’s possible to thrive in the NFL without drafting elite players who hang around and become cornerstones of a contending team. The Houston Texans are an example, though they were aided by Cleveland’s willingness to trade a lifetime’s worth of high draft picks for a quarterback. More often, though, contending teams have key veterans not just anchoring the team with their experience but continuing to play at an elite level. Look no further than the Eagles, whose dominating offensive and defensive lines have been filled by veterans for a decade, most of them home-grown. The same has been true for the Cowboys, especially on the offensive line.

I used Pro Football Focus grades for the 2023 season to get an idea of how prevalent veteran players are among the league leaders in various categories. The chart below shows how many “elite” (80s and 90s) and “above average” (70s) players there were in different categories that PFF evaluates, and how many of these were players who entered the league when Jerry Reese was the Giants’ GM (i.e., pre-2018):

The numbers include only those players who played at least 50% of the typical number of snaps performing the activity listed. Thus, the different categories mostly sort players at different positions, but not completely. For example, “pass rush” is all edge defenders and IDLs, even though off-ball linebackers and defensive backs occasionally rush the passer. “Receiving” is strictly wide receivers and tight ends, even though running backs catch passes sometimes too. On the other hand, “pass blocking” and “run blocking” can in principle include the same players, but in practice some offensive lines are good at one and not so good at the other. But figure that there were something like 100 veteran players in the league from the Reese era who were at least above average last season…and not a single one was a Giant.

Interesting things that the results show include:

• Almost half the NFL’s best pass rushers are players who have been in the league for a long time (> 6 years). This suggests that, instant wonders like Micah Parsons aside, edge defender is a learned skill at the NFL level for some players, and perhaps we should not judge drafted pass rushers too quickly.
• The same is true, maybe even more so, for pass blocking. More than half the elite pass blockers in 2023 were players who were drafted before 2018. A decent number of these players started as average or above average and then became elite after a few years. Andrew Thomas, who is only a four-year veteran, followed that track but more quickly than some.
• For whatever reason, the opposite is true of run blocking, where only a small fraction of the elite blockers have been around for a long time. It could be something physical, like the physical nature of the job wearing players down over time. Or maybe it could be a selection effect – good run blockers who aren’t also good pass blockers don’t get second contracts as often.
• Rushing, though, is as much a veteran’s game as almost any other position, a surprising result given the “wall” that running backs supposedly hit after a few years. Maybe there are skills to be learned that keep some running backs in the league even when their bodies start to wear down?
• Pass coverage, on the other hand, is a young man’s game, as is pass receiving. There’s no shortage of great veteran pass receivers in the NFL, but it seems that almost every year now there are potentially elite receivers to be had in the draft, and the same is true of defensive backs. Perhaps more to the point, defensive backs and wide receivers may sometimes begin to lose a step or two as they age or due to injury (e.g., James Bradberry, Odell Beckham Jr.), and their speed and agility are a large part of what makes the best ones elite.

In total, the chart suggests that a typical NFL team should have something like 10 players or so seeing the field at least half the time who play at an above-average or elite level, and about a third or more of these should be players on their their second (or more) contracts. Entering the 2024 season, the Giants at the moment have no one that they drafted before 2018 at all on the roster. Among projected starters on offense and defense, only Darren Waller (if he plays) and Jermaine Eluemunor joined the NFL while Jerry Reese was the Giants’ GM. Neither was above average in PFF grade in 2023, but both were close.

Thus, there is a big hole in veteran presence that is not the doing of Joe Schoen (directly, and even indirectly to the extent that his financial hands were tied by the cap situation he inherited his first two years). Schoen has acted to do something about that going forward, by signing 2019 draftee Dexter Lawrence and 2020 draftee Andrew Thomas to second contracts, and by bringing in 2019 draftees Bobby Okereke and Brian Burns on significant contracts. Lawrence and Thomas are now elite players, and Okereke and Burns are knocking on the door.

Coincidentally – or maybe not – Lawrence, Thomas, and Burns play positions at which the chart above suggests veterans can thrive. Xavier McKinney and Julian Love on the other hand were not signed to second contracts, and Darius Slayton has been unable to date to get an extension; maybe it was just the price point, or maybe Schoen thought their best years would soon be behind them.

With luck Eluemunor will become a consistently above-average player, and hopefully some of Schoen’s own draftees will as well. There’s still time for Kayvon Thibodeaux, and even Azeez Ojulari if he can stay healthy. Likewise there is time for Evan Neal although the odds of him becoming better than average at this point seem slim. John Michael Schmitz may be a better bet.

It will be those players, though, rather than the dearth of veteran talent he inherited, that should ultimately define whether Schoen’s tenure is viewed as successful or not. 2024 is too soon to draw that conclusion. We’ll see in a couple of years whether he is able to part the seas of futility of the Giants’ recent past or whether he turns out to be another false prophet. Giants fans could use some manna from heaven.