Giants co-owner John Mara justifies the decisions to trade receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and defensive end Olivier Vernon and to let safety Landon Collins leave via free agency by explaining that the team needed to do something big.
"[L]et’s face it,” Mara recently said, “we’ve had one winning season, 2016, here and the other five or six years have not been so good since we won that last Super Bowl. So we needed some drastic changes.”
He’s right about that. Since winning the Super Bowl that capped the 2011 season, the Giants have missed the playoffs six of seven times. So, yes, drastic changes were needed.
So why is Eli Manning still on the team?
The Giants have drafted Manning’s eventual successor, but the plan seems to be to let Manning start the season as the starter. And Mara is rooting for the Giants to be so good that Manning will keep rookie Daniel Jones on the bench all year long.
That’s fine, but why didn’t Mara see Eli as part of the problem when Mara concluded that Beckham, Vernon, and Collins needed to go? Simms and I recently addressed the subject, and we wondered whether owners get so smitten with franchise quarterbacks that owners simply can’t get rid of them.
Mara has bristled at the idea that sentimentality has saved Eli in New York, saying that the suggestion is “absolutely nonsense” and that it “really gets under my skin.”
“Do I feel a certain amount of sentimentality towards Eli?” Mara said in March. “Of course I do. Would I ever let that get in the way of making a football decision? Absolutely not! And I cannot believe some of you write that.”
Mara may be protesting too much. By all appearances, he has a blind spot for Eli. And even though it seems to be shrinking, it’s still there, big enough to make Mara hopeful that Manning can still do what he has failed to do six of seven times since delivering his most recent Super Bowl win.
If he does, if the Giants somehow end up in the playoffs, what happens next? Will Jones stay on the bench and will Manning continue to be the quarterback?
At some point, the Giants need to rip the Band-Aid off. Mara, like plenty of other NFL owners, doesn’t seem to be inclined to do it. Even if it’s becoming more and more clear that it needs to be done.