Year One: Giants realize they need a change, so they hire a head coach with an offensive background and commit to acquiring players to improve the most fundamental aspects of the team that have been suffering in recent years (defense and O-line).

Season One: Giants are improved, but not great with a ways to go yet.

Year Two: The Giants take their improvement way too much to heart, believing they are just an offensive playmaker or two away from competing at the highest level, and promptly spend the offseason acquiring pass-catchers.

Season Two: The Giants display a gross lack in a fundamental area of the game, and regress. The coach is fired and the Giants recommit to improving that area.

We saw this is 2016-17 with Ben Mcadoo, where they went all in on their defense, acquiring Damion Harrison, Olivier Vernon and Janoris Jenkins to improve the defense, make the playoffs but struggle due to poor O-line play, prompting them to draft Evan Engram with their first pick and sign Brandon Marshall & Rhett Ellison. It turns out that only using a sixth round draft pick to improve the struggling O-line does not have much of an effect.

So in 2018, they hired Pat Shurmer, signed Nate Solder and drafted Will Hernandez. They won more games than they had the prior year and 8 of 11 losses were by a single score. Progress! They promptly signed Golden Tate and drafted a quarterback with their first pick, and did not acquire an offensive lineman until the seventh round of the draft, having passed at on least two future All-pro lineman to draft that QB. They then regressed, with 7 of 12 losses by decisive scores.

They began the cycle anew with Joe Judge, a special teams and receivers coach, who had never been an offensive or defensive coordinator, much less a head coach, at any level. They signed James Bradberry and Blake Martinez and only spent a pittance on a couple of backup tight ends, while drafting offensive linemen with three of their first five picks and spending the other seven draft picks on defensive players. Ah! They figured it out! No wasting resources on ball-handlers! We're back to the fundamentals. They won two more games than the prior year, and finished in second place, only a game behind the division champ. Clearly they were on the rise, only a playmaker or two away from the top...
Which means their biggest free agent signing was Kenny Gollday, a wide receiver on whom they spent just about as much as all their other free agents combined. They used their first round pick on a wide receiver, and not a single pick on an offensive lineman. The sole free agent lineman was signed for 1.7% of what they spent on Golladay. And the Giants went on to lose three more games than the prior season, and despite the pass-catching talent they picked up, failed to score 30 points in even a single game. They scored 3 touchdowns in only two games and one of those, got the third in overtime.

Once more, they fired the coach, replaced him with offensive-backgrounded Brian Daboll. They used two of their first four draft picks for offensive linemen, and the first for a defensive end, and their biggest free agent contract went to an offensive lineman and only 2 of 11 picks were used on ball-handlers. They won more games than they lost for only the second time since Tom Coughlin's tenure, and even won their first playoff game since Obama's first term. Which naturally meant their major off-season acquisitions were a wide receiver and a tight end, and they avoided drafting a wideout with their first pick, because as previously chronicled on this MB, the four teams drafting right before them cleared all the first-round quality wide receivers from the board. Then in the third round, they traded two picks to move up to take another wideout whom the rest of the league rejected 70 times. They did use two daft picks on cornerbacks and one on a center, whom we had the delightful experience of watching repeatedly draw penalties to give the Cowboys first downs they were unlikely to earn on their own given all their drops, and a bad snap that marked a sharp divide in the game before which the Giants were one their way to taking the lead, and after which, they fell behind on the immediate subsequent play, and never again came close. The blocking was non-existent, which meant Daniel Jones was sacked seven times, which was seven passes that never reached any of our fancy new receivers.

I imagine it's only a matter of months before Brian Daboll is fired and the Giants are perusing scouting reports to figure out which lineman to draft with yet another top ten pick, in order to get back to the fundamentals...