Can Joe Schoen work (cap) magic to make the Giants competitive in 2025?

GM philosophy + owner constraints will tell

Obviously this is a big offseason for the Joe Schoen-Brian Daboll tandem that was brought in by New York Giants’ owners John Mara and Steve Tisch early in 2022. Fielding one competitive team in three years isn’t going to cut it, so the pressure will be on for them to make the 2025 season a good one.

The problem is, with that season-long Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, they may be tempted to make rash moves. You know, like trading for a 40-year-old future Hall of Fame quarterback, then acquiring four of his former wide receivers, only to have it all blow up.

Seriously, if the Giants are not to go the way of the New York Jets, they have to improve this season while also setting the team up for long-term success. Almost everything Schoen has done suggests that he’s tried to build a winner in what he sees as the right way - letting positional value dictate the sizes of contracts he offers, using free agency moderately to fill holes but mostly avoiding big-ticket items, primarily building through the draft, acquiring only high-character players, and extending star players before their contract year.

It’s an admirable goal. Unfortunately it hasn’t worked, for three reasons:

1. The Daniel Jones saga has been discussed to death, but the die was cast for that to always be a messy situation as soon as he took the Giants job and Jones outperformed his history in his first year with Daboll. Schoen had a choice to make, and as the Grail Knight said to Indiana Jones, “He chose...poorly.”
2. Schoen’s first two drafts were mostly bad, and only in his third crack did he seem to redeem himself. Hopefully that’s a trend and not a one-year exception, but one data point doesn’t make a trend.
3. Building the “right way” doesn’t work anymore in the NFL. That’s what this post is about. The Super Bowl pitted a team with so many players who’ve gotten into trouble you could make a police lineup out of them against a team that spends so much money that they may rename themselves the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Like the Dodgers in the World Series, that second team won the Super Bowl handily. Schoen has to learn from that. The question is, will Mara and Tisch let him? The NFL’s salary cap is supposed to create a level playing field that prevents situations like you have in baseball, where a few teams with lots of money are the only ones with any chance to win a World Series. Still, relative wealth can play a role in the NFL. Every team has the same salary cap to deal with, but cash spent is not limited in the same way that cap space is. With creative accounting, owners can spend as much as they want.

Mara ($500M) and Tisch ($1.6B) together are only the 24th richest NFL owners. That’s a far cry from...