- Giants’ GM Joe Schoen doesn’t make the draft picks … Fact is he also doesn’t make the trades, doesn’t signed the free agents and doesn’t hire and fire the coaches. For that matter neither did Dave Gettleman nor Jerry Reese nor any Giants G.M. going back to the days of George Young. The Giants are a multi-billion dollar sports franchise with an annual operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And those are all going to be corporate decisions with inputs from all kinds of people including coaches, scouts, other senior personnel staff, the salary cap people, the medical staff and ownership. Clearly, Schoen, or whoever is the G.M., is going to be heavily involved, but his role is to make sure the various departments have the resources to do their particular job and to shepherd the various elements toward a decision that hopefully everyone is ultimately on board with.
- Nobody just makes the picks! …! Underlying the whole the G.M. makes the picks narrative is the assumption that said G.M. approaches draft day pretty much the way the average fan on the street does. Come the draft, he sits in the team’s war room and checks off the picks as other teams ahead of them make their selections. Then when the Giants finally get on the clock with their pick, he makes the choice from the available players. And maybe there was a time years ago when that’s kind of how it operated. However, today, NFL teams, including the Giants, are much more proactive. Indeed, rather than simply being reactive, they are going to go into the draft with a plan what they want to accomplish. In the process they will have identified either the position or positions they want to address and/or the particular player or players they want to target. They will go into each round with a short list of players that they would like to acquire and take the guy left at the top of the list when they do pick. Of course, that’s a bit of a simplification because, as the draft unfolds, they’ll be considering all the options like whether they’ll need to move up to get their guy or maybe can afford to drop down and pick up an extra pick or two and still get their, but as much as possible its all going to have been planned for in advance.
- Its still a crapshoot! … We also get a chuckle or two when people tell us that ‘yeah, yeah, yeah … I know the draft is a crapshoot, but boy did we ever blow that pick!!’ We say the draft is a lottery, a crapshoot, like flipping coins, because it is a lottery, a crapshoot, like flipping coins. In fact, once you get players ranked in rows, which really is the easy part, nobody knows any more than the next guy which guys in that row are going to star and which ones are going to bust. George Young said it best years ago when he said re the draft that ‘you gather all the info you can, make the best choice you can, and then cross your fingers that your guy can play and stay healthy. Unfortunately, though, hindsight makes geniuses of us all and we call the guys who hit their picks geniuses and the guys who don’t losers! Remember that the GOAT was a unheralded 6th round pick, while in the end pretty close to half of all top 5 picks never worked out.
- The myth of BPA … If I had a dollar for everybody that’s said to me ‘I just want the Giants to take the best available player’ I could probably retire! That notion implies that teams go into the draft with a ranking of the players on their list from 1 to 300 or whatever and take the highest rated guy still on their list when their turn comes literally regardless of position. However, in reality, teams rank players in groups or layers or rows with prospects with the same or similar grade lumped together. Its probably more accurate to say that as much as possible ‘teams stick to their board’ with the player they take coming from the highest remaining level or row from their short list above. That isn’t to say that BPA doesn’t exist, but it really only comes into play when a player from a higher than expected level or row and doesn’t really play a position of need is still on the board when a team picks. Think someone like Mathias Kiwanuka in 2006 or Prince Amukamara in 2011.
- The myth of ‘building through the draft!’ … It sounds great in principle but the reality is that with free agency these days you can’t build a 10-year roster like you could in the 1980s. In fact, every team pretty much turns their full roster over every 5 years or so. What teams are starting to realize is that what you want to do is use the draft to get your impact players, especially in the early, and then use free agency and the later rounds to fill in the other blanks as best as they can. Kansas City, for example, has not been the best team in the league the past 4-5 years because they have the fewest holes in their roster. What they do have is the best QB in the league throwing to a track team of a receiver corps. And its pretty much the same story for all the other really good teams in the league.
- You can’t fix everything in one draft! … In fact, without being really, really lucky, you really can’t fix all that much at all with one draft, given that on average, teams generally don’t get more than 3-4 players who can contribute at all out of any one draft. And even though they are expected to have 11 picks this year, it is going to be difficult for the Giants to accomplish a whole lot with their 2023 draft. The problem is that most of those picks are third day selections, and while teams can always can find the occasional starter in the later rounds, the reality is that most good players come in the early rounds. And this year the Giants only have two picks in the top 75 – they had 5 last year – and just one in the top 50 – versus 3 last year.
- There are other ways to get there! … Hopefully, the Giants will be able to add a couple or three more good players in this year’s draft; however, we suspect that any major improvements next season are more likely to come from within. And fortunately the Giants have a lot of room to grow with some of the guys already on the roster. The oline, for example, does have a group of young interior OL people including Bredeson, Gates, Lemieux, Ezedu and McKethan that have all shown some potential. And that’s not counting the likelihood that the Giants should be able to afford upgrades in their FA olinemen over Feliciano and Glowinski. The big issue on the OL though is RT where Evan Neal wasn’t very good last year. But he was the 7th player picked in the draft and obviously has oodles of physical potential. The question is whether he can refine his technique like Andrew Thomas did or will stagnate like Ercik Flowers. Time will tell. Its the defensive line, though, that could give the Giants a real boost next year. It has the potential to be one of the best in the league if they can get everyone healthy and playing to their potential. Last year. for example, Leo Williams, Ojulari and Thibo combined for just 12 sacks, when each of those guys has the tools to get double-digit sack numbers on their own.
