Joe Schoen Focused on Fixing Giants Before Chances Run Out

New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen looks at the state of the team he had a large hand in assembling, and he knows that with just two wins this season and five wins over the last season, it’s not nearly good enough to brag about.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is being honest with himself about whether he’s truly done enough to get the Giants back to relevancy or if he’s completely lost the plot.

“It's five wins in the last two years,” Schoen said. “It's not good enough. It's not good enough. I'm not gonna make excuses. It's not good enough, and I don't wanna go through the different scenarios individually. There's context to a lot of things, but it's five wins. It's not good enough, and we've gotta get better.”

While it’s not Schoen out there game-planning, making the plays, or, as has been the case of late, missing the plays, there are serious questions about the roster he’s assembled and the practices he still adheres to.

One of the biggest ones, for example, is the insistence in hanging on to players who no longer fit into the overall roster plan, such as offensive tackle Evan Neal, receiver Jalin Hyatt, and quarterback Russell Wilson, all of whom took up osster spots that could have better be filled at positions of need elsewhere on the roster that were thinned out by injury.

There is also the question of going back on one of the battle cries Schoen issued when he was first hired back in 2022: “draft, develop, and retain.” And he’s done a particularly questionable job regarding the retention part of the equation.

This comes after he’s basically flung open the door for guys like Leonard Williams, running back Saquon Barkley, and safeties Julian Love and Xavier McKinney to all waltz away to other teams where they have all flourished as Pro Bowlers.

“I'll just say this: nobody's perfect, and the chance of me batting a thousand is gone because I've made mistakes, okay?” he said.

“Lesson learned. Don't make it again. But as you go through it, there have been a lot of decisions that have gone right, so what can we learn from that? As long as we're learning and continuing to get better and don't make the same mistakes twice, then that's progress.”

Except, again, it’s not progress when the team has single-digit wins over two seasons, which again calls into question the mistakes being made and whether the organization is truly learning from them.

Schoen insists that his confidence in himself, his staff, and the team’s processes hasn’t wavered. But he also said he’s a realist who understands it’s a results-oriented business, and that the desired results haven't been there.

“Everybody's gonna make mistakes, and we're gonna get some things right? As long as you're learning from those mistakes and you reflect on the process in place, and where you went wrong, and you can continue to get better, that's what's most important.”

Although he’s gotten a vote of confidence from ownership, which came last month when head coach Brian Daboll was fired, Schoen knows that nothing is finalized and that circumstances could still change.

But he’s also prepared to defend his position to ownership should it come down to that.

“Nobody focuses on what went wrong more than me–like you're continually beating yourself up. These are decisions that live on: whether it's a draft, free agency, or hiring a coach, you gotta live with those decisions.

“I'm not gonna get into details, but there's some early on where we strayed from maybe what we believe in, and I've gotta live with that. I've gotta learn from it, educate my staff on what we can do better.”

But with three out of his four years producing disastrous results, ownership’s patience is undoubtedly running thin. With it, Schoen’s mulligans are undoubtedly drying up, placing even more pressure on him to figure things out.

Schoen is confident he can do that.

“With the people we have in the building, the collaborative approach, we're gonna get this thing right,” he vowed.

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