Before modification by Cannoli at 27/12/2024 02:28:41 PM
As for Gettleman, as you point out he didn't listen to his own advice. He telegraphed his Plan A every year in a league that guards draft plans like the nuclear codes, then had no viable Plan B if it didn't work out.
Example 1, he was so in love with Saquon that when the Browns took Mayfield first overall, he refused the Cardinals offer of 3 first round picks for the number 2 slot! They desperately wanted Darnold and ended up settling for Rosen when the Giants wouldn't trade back.
The third year, assuming AZ was offering their 2018, '19 & '20 picks, they drafted Isaiah Simmons with the 8th pick in 2020. He is currently in a reserve LB/S role with NY. So of the first three picks in 2020 to never make a Pro Bowl, the Giants have two, Simmons & Andrew Thomas.
For the record, there were three linemen drafted after the pick the Giants traded away, who have made the Pro Bowl. Two of them were still on the board when the Giants took Toney.
Oh yeah, but there is nothing to be gained by going into his faults and flaws in this discussion. I bring up his successes only to illustrate how even that clown did better than Schoen in some ways.
I would go further and argue against EVER wasting a first round pick on a ball handler. Maybe if you are rock solid in all other areas of the roster (hint: never gonna happen) or a generational talent somehow falls to the bottom half of the first round.
Since Phil Simms in 1979, the Giants have used their first round picks on the following ball-handlers:
RBs
Butch Woolfolk
George Adams
Rodney Hampton
Jarrod Bunch
Tyrone Wheatley
Ron Dayne
David Wilson
Saquon Barkley
Woolfolk was displaced as the franchise back by Joe Morris, taken in the second round of the same draft. So it's not like their timetable would have been different. Adams missed his second season on IR (the Giants' first Super Bowl year) and his career never went anywhere. His primary NFL legacy is his son, a safety named Jamal. Hampton was a franchise great, but never played in a Super Bowl. The Giants went his rookie year, but he was injured in the playoffs and missed the big game, where the MVP was Otis Anderson, a former star who had been considered washed up and discarded by his original team four years before. The Giants even partially agreed with that assessment, letting him score a short-yardage touchdown in Super Bowl XXI, after they were already up 33-10, perhaps in a jab at the Chicago Bears, who had, the prior year, used DT William Perry on a trick play in a gimme TD situation in XX, leaving their all-time great RB Walter Payton, without a Super Bowl touchdown on his career resume. The point is, when they went to the Super Bowl with Hampton, they didn't exactly require the services of a franchise running back, doing just fine with an "over the hill" 12th year RB (e.g a guy with twice as much time in service as Saquon Barkley had at the point when Joe Schoen thinks RBs become useless), a 2nd year scat-back & return specialist, and a 2nd year back who had broken Payton's school records in college, plus a fullback who had run for 1,000 yards in one season in the USFL while sharing a backfield with Herschel Walker. Anyway, Bunch was a total bust, whom I have no memory of watching on the football field, but twice spotting playing a bouncer on TV (Rizzoli & Isles and The Unit), Wheatley was Hampton's understudy for a couple years before going to the Raiders, Dayne's primary value to the Giants was in lighting a fire under Tiki Barber's ass to finally put in the work to step up his game and take over as the franchise back in his forth season. Wilson had amazing talent, but ended up being a flop when he had to retire for medical reasons after only a couple of seasons. His rookie (best) year was mostly memorable for his backflip celebrations, once he got over his tendency to turnover the ball against Dallas, but he didn't do a whole lot to help the Giants' offense, as their Super Bowl era line was falling apart. And finally there is Barkley, whose talent was utterly wasted because of the failure to build a team around him by stocking up at the positions needed to make best use of an elite rusher. The Giants always did much better building a great line with multiple All-Pros and letting a running back by committee approach win them three of their four Super Bowls. Whenever they drafted a running back with a top pick, he turned out to be inferior to the talent already on the roster (Adams, Bunch, Wheatley, Dayne) or an unnecessary luxury when they could have been, I believe, equally, if not more successful with a lesser, but not faulty, option already in place. Lewis Tillman, in the case of Hampton, and Wayne Gallman wrt Barkley. Or, hell, even Nick Chubb, who was on the board when the Giants made their second pick after Barkley. I rather think they'd have had a better running game with Chubb running behind Quenton Nelson, than they did with Barkley running behind Will Hernandez (whom they took with that pick).
WRs
Mark Ingram
Thomas Lewis
Ike Hilliard
Hakeem Nicks
Odell Beckham Jr
Kadarius Toney
Malik Nabors
Ingram was a competent receiver, and arguably the Giants' best for a few years. He is one of a very few (two, actually) players on these lists to play in a Giants' Super Bowl victory, turning a Jeff Hostetler pass that only went six yards in the air on 3rd & 14, with multiple defenders between him and the line to gain, into a 15 yard gain for a first down, to help sustain the longest time of possession drive in Super Bowl history. But he never went to a Pro Bowl, nor was he ever considered a star. Thomas Lewis was a flat out bust, of whom my most distinct memory is reading the Star Ledger sports page while watchin a game, reading GM George Young's insistence that the Giants still believed in Lewis, only to look up to the screen to see a pass hit Lewis in the chest, only for him turn upfield before securing the ball, with the result of him simply deflecting the ball into the arms of a defender behind him. Nice try, George. Hilliard was another competent receiver who wasn't a star, and like so many of 1st round RBs, turned out to be the #2 man to a guy already on the roster, in this case, Amani Toomer. The sole improvement being that Hilliard and Toomer could be on the field at the same time, and complement one another, unlike, say, George Adams & Joe Morris, or Tyrone Wheatley & Rodney Hampton. Hakeem Nicks was another such receiver, who was drafted primarily as a replacement for the recently ventilated Plexico Burress, spent his rookie year as an alternate option to Steve Smith, who was setting a franchise record for receptions, had a single year as WR1, apparently because Victor Cruz got hurt and spent his rookie year on IR, only to pop out and wrest away the spotlight(and eventual overpaid contract) from Nicks. Nicks, is, with Ingram, one of the only two Giants 1st round ballhandlers to contribute to a Super Bowl win, which he did with some admittedly spectacular long touchdown catches in the playoffs, although his final catch in the Super Bowl saw him meekly letting himself be pushed out of bounds in the red zone, just when the Giants were trying to run off as much time as possible before taking the lead and having to give the ball back to Brady. Beckham, of course, was the Saquon Barkley of WRs: possibly the most spectacular player ever to suit up at that position in Giants' history, but because he was taken at the expense of more legitimate needs (OFFENSIVE fucking LINE), only had a single winning season in his whole career in New York. Toney, was, of course, Toney, and Nabors is being praised for his play which seems to be completely unrelated to the success of the Giants offense, though with some memorable fourth quarter drops against division opponents. Needless to say, a major issue is the lack of someone to throw him the ball, because the Giants saw no need to take one of the QBs on the board at the time, like Michael Penix or Bo Nix, who are probably never going to amount to anything, or ever look like a better option than Drew Locke, Tommy DeVito or Tim Boyle, or have the long-term potential of a Daniel Jones.
TEs
Derek Brown
Jeremy Shockey
Evan Engram
Brown was a bust, Shockey was an excellent player who, like Hampton, was injured the one year they reached the Super Bowl during his career, and Engram is part of the trifecta with Barkley & Beckham, who had amazing talent, but only not even one winning season while with the Giants. In fact, their last two winning seasons were 2016 & 2022. Engram played in NY from 2017 to 2021.
QBs
Dave Brown
Phillip Rivers
Daniel Jones
Jones and Brown have the historical distinction of being the last two Duke quarterbacks to be drafted by the NFL, in 1992 & 2019. 31 NFL teams have not drafted a Duke QB in over 32 years, but the Giants did, twice. Once with a supplemental pick that they had no idea how valuable the actual pick it would cost might be (9th overall, forcing them to wait until the second round to grab Michael Strahan), and once with the 6th pick in the draft. Ahead of 25 future All-Pros (two of whom, to be fair, were taken by NY). Rivers, meanwhile, has the distinction of probably being the best quarterback the Giants have ever drafted, and they paid exorbitantly to send him elsewhere. I love Eli Manning, and I'm glad for all he has done for the team, but in the sense of cold, hard football business, I am still pissed at how the Giants let themselves get reamed in that trade. Was Manning better than Rivers? Yes. Was he two additional draft picks better, when the Giants were trying to rebuild? Hell, no. Going into the draft, I was fine with sticking with Kerry Collins for a couple more years (the following season, Aaron Rodger was available at the very bottom of the first round, so they could have started working on Collins' successor even if Tom Coughlin had turned things around right away), and drafting a lineman (Robert Gallery, who, as it turned out, was not so great, but, hey, maybe under Coughlin instead of the Oakland shitshow, he might have lived up to his potential) or a defensive playmaker, like Sean Taylor (who might have been alive today if he had been living in North Jersey, instead of the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, VA murder zone). But if we HAD to go for our franchise QB THAT year, I wanted Ben Roethlisberger. Who was a year younger, and turned out to be more immediately NFL-ready, than Manning, and had more experience playing in cold weather than Manning or Rivers. That being said, I would have been fine with the devoutly Catholic Rivers, who eventually outdid Manning in his one individual record, consecutive games started. Roethlisberger would win as many Super Bowls as Manning, and both QBs would last longer in the NFL than he. I would certainly never have traded an additional first rounder for Manning. Hell, I'd have told San Diego "Good luck dealing with a player who doesn't want to be there, and/or his diva daddy who would announce such a thing right before the draft, and who I am really fucking sick of hearing about, considering he had zero winning seasons, let alone playoff victories or rings in his NFL career. If you want me to take that mess off your hands, and give you the QB you supposedly actually want, you're going to have to add something to make it worthy MY while. And for asking for Osi Umenyiora AND Phillip Rivers in exchange for what might the Fredo of a Manning family that at this moment is infamous for the inverse correlation of hype to rings, the price has just gone up." We'll never know how much of the Giants' Super Bowl wins was the Manning magic, and how much was great line play, the NASCAR defense and some truly amazing plays by his receivers.
You win Super Bowls with defense and line play. So use your best picks on THAT. The one truly great team the Giants ever fielded in the Super Bowl era, was the 1986 team. The first draft to provide players for that team was 1979, with Phil Simms (and Otis Anderson, going one pick later to the Cardinals). Over the next seven drafts, they took defensive players first 5 times and the two years they didn't were the years they essentially wasted with picks on Woolfolk & Adams, neither of whom contributed at all to that championship season. Those defensive picks included Lawrence Taylor, Terry Kinard, Mark Haynes, Carl Banks, and Eric Dorsey. Dorsey would succeed George Martin as the Beatles' producer in finishing A Song of Ice and Fire, as starting defensive end the following season and hold the job through their next Super Bowl win, until Dan Reeves' rebuild. The Super Bowl year, they had 14 draft picks, only six of which were offensive, four of whom were ball handlers, and only ONE of whom would ever play a down in the NFL. People expected the Giants to supplement their offense that year, since the defense was already so good. Sports Illustrated described Bill Parcells' approach to the draft as a hobbyist purchasing luxury items for his collection instead of groceries to feed his family. Instead, with a first and four second round draft picks, the Giants added four future starters and two future Pro-Bowlers, even if their positions were at the time, staffed with about-to-be Super Bowl starters.
The Giants and the draft is something of a sore spot with me.