Giants’ new regime enters season having not even started the true rebuild

By Ralph Vacchiano
FOX Sports NFC East Writer

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It’s been a crazy week at the end of a crazy summer, with the Giants juggling injuries and finances as they try to piece together their roster. 

The new regime didn’t exactly inherit a gold mine here. They knew it wouldn’t be easy to build a competitive team. So it’s no wonder that GM Joe Schoen ducked any questions about expectations during his press conference on Thursday. 

Because the truth, for the Giants, is that the expectations aren’t exactly good.

“We’re just trying to get through today,” Schoen said. “I don’t want to set any expectations.”

That’s been the talking point ever since Schoen and new coach Brian Daboll were hired back in January. They knew their primary task would be to clean up the mess left from the Dave Gettleman era and hit the reset button for the entire franchise. They took over a bad team (22-59 over the past five seasons) filled with bloated contracts (like receiver Kenny Golladay‘s four-year, $72 million deal) and key players coming off injuries and facing uncertain futures (most notably quarterback Daniel Jones and running back Saquon Barkley).

They did have a bunch of high draft picks, but they were so deep in salary-cap hell that they had to cut valuable players, like cornerback James Bradberry, and they were left with almost no money to restock the team. Almost all their free-agent activity was the bargain-basement variety. Their biggest splurge was on veteran guard Mark Glowinski, who got only a three-year, $18.3 million deal.

That’s no way to rebuild a bad team, and Schoen knew it. But he also knew he couldn’t fix this franchise until the Gettleman wreckage was gone. That will take time. At least one year.

Probably more.

“The situation is the situation,” Schoen said. “It’s the hand we were dealt. We’re going to do the best we can with what we have. We’ll try to compete the best we can.”

Maybe that’s not an inspiring, rousing pep talk to start the season. They won’t sell a lot of motivational T-shirts with the slogan “We’ll do the best we can.” But it is a necessary, cold splash of reality about the state of the Giants. And Schoen has been honest about that from the start.

And while he won’t come out and say they are punting on 2022 in the hopes of a better future, Schoen and Daboll really didn’t have much of a choice. It would take a stunning turn of events, really, for the Giants to be a playoff contender this season with the flawed roster they have. They’d need everything to go right and everyone to stay healthy. They’d need Jones and Barkley to play like elite players, Golladay to live up to his crazy contract, receiver Kadarius Toney to show he was worthy of being a first-round pick a year ago and the patchwork offensive line to stay healthy — which so far has not happened.

If all that works out … well, even then the Giants are probably just staring at mediocrity. The ceiling on this group probably isn’t much more than a .500 team.

But Year 1 for Schoen and Daboll was never going to be about the playoffs or even the record. It’s all about laying the foundation for the future. It’s about finding out if Jones is the right quarterback, or if they need to move on. It’s about deciding if Barkley is worth another contract after his expires at the end of the season.

It’s about finding out what they have and what they don’t have and, perhaps most importantly, returning the franchise to cap health. That’s something Schoen has worked diligently and painfully at all offseason long — so he can rebuild this team his way and the right way, starting next year.

“Yeah, to come out in good salary cap health, I’ve talked about that a lot,” Schoen said. “Going into next year’s free agency, we’ll definitely have a lot more flexibility than we had this year.”

And that’s when the rebuilding will really start. The Giants will have the cap room to spend in March of 2023. They won’t have nearly as many suffocating contracts weighing them down. They’ll know where they stand at quarterback. They’ll have a better idea of what they have in Barkley. Schoen will have the “flexibility” to bring in players that he and Daboll want. He’ll have room to explore trades.

But that’s all about next year and beyond. They didn’t have the ability to do any of that this year. They were stuck trying to fix a crumbling organization with dollar-store rubber bands and glue. They do have slightly more overall talent than they had a year ago, and maybe with a lot better coaching and a little more health than they had the past few years, they can improve on last year’s 4-12 record.

But probably not by much.

That is the “situation” Schoen was talking about. They did what they could, and they surely wish they could have done more. They won’t give up hope. You’ll never hear them give up on this season. There’s always a chance for a surprise.

“I really don’t truly have a feel yet,” Schoen said. “I think it’s going to take a few weeks to really figure out who we are.”

In a few weeks, he’s probably not going to be happy with what he has discovered. But he hopes everything will look a whole lot better in a few years.

Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and the Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that he spent 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. A Long Island, N.Y. native and graduate of Syracuse University, he can be found on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.