There’s nowhere left for general manager Joe Schoen to hide.
The 2-10 New York Giants have turned the final weeks of this woeful season into the NFL version of “Survivor,” voting someone off the coaching staff after each loss. On Monday, defensive coordinator Shane Bowen’s torch was extinguished after his unit blew another double-digit fourth-quarter lead in a 34-27 overtime loss to the Lions. That came two weeks after head coach Brian Daboll was voted off the island after the Giants dropped to 2-8 for the third consecutive season.
The coaching staff had been Schoen’s “Immunity Idol.” Now, he’s out of fall guys. The focus for the final five games shifts exclusively to the roster Schoen assembled. A roster that hasn’t been able to make a play to secure a win in the three games they’ve led by at least 10 points in the fourth quarter.
“Made the tough decision today to let Shane go as our defense coordinator,” interim coach Mike Kafka announced Monday morning. “The results just weren’t where we wanted them to be.”
Much like Daboll, Bowen’s firing was completely warranted. Blown leads aside, the Giants rank 30th in the league in both points and yards allowed.
The greater question is why it took so long to make this move. Forget Bowen surviving the epic collapse in Denver when the Giants allowed 33 points in the fourth quarter to blow a 19-point lead in Week 7. And it’s not even about Bowen outlasting Daboll, despite a squandered 10-point fourth-quarter Week 10 lead in Chicago, which served as the final straw for the head coach.
The wildest aspect of Bowen’s extended reprieve is that co-owner John Mara teed up the coordinator’s firing the day after last season ended.
“I didn’t think our defense played very well this year at all,” Mara said on Jan. 6. “I’m tired of watching teams go up and down the field on us.”
The comments from Mara were so strong that a list of potential replacements was running through my head before Daboll announced hours later that he was retaining Bowen. The Giants wouldn’t have even needed to fire Bowen. They could have just let him reunite with Mike Vrabel in New England and played off the departure as a magnanimous gesture.
The only logical explanation for retaining Bowen after Mara’s comments is that Daboll didn’t want to deal with the optics of replacing another coordinator a year after his ugly divorce from Wink Martindale. The search for Martindale’s replacement was meandering, with top targets like Dennard Wilson and Bobby Babich rebuffing the Giants’ interest.
That led to the hiring of Bowen, a moment that was captured in a cringeworthy Hard Knocks scene with Daboll reciting to Schoen the coordinator’s stats with the Titans. Bowen was an uninspiring selection, but the defense wasn’t the main problem in his first season, as Daboll’s offense was completely dysfunctional.
The Giants went 3-14 last season with an offense that ranked 31st in scoring. Bowen’s defense finished a pedestrian 21st in points allowed.
The bottom fell out defensively this season despite significant investments to upgrade the unit. Schoen doled out $99 million in free agency to sign cornerback Paulson Adebo and safety Jevon Holland before selecting edge rusher Abdul Carter with the No. 3 pick in the draft.
The Giants have the second-most money in the NFL invested in their defense this season, according to Over the Cap. That outlay yielding these results is obviously unacceptable, and Bowen paid for it with his job.
Bowen’s vanilla schemes and conservative play calling late in games were major problems this season. But having the 32nd-ranked rushing defense seems more tied to personnel.
Again, Daboll was gushing over Bowen’s run defense from three seasons as the Titans’ DC when he was hired. Bowen’s defenses ranked first, second and 13th in rushing yards allowed in his three seasons calling plays in Tennessee. The Giants ranked 27th in rushing yards allowed last season before bottoming out at 32nd this season.
The inability to stop the run is endemic to the Giants since Martindale saw a similar decline when he arrived in New York. Martindale’s defenses ranked in the top 10 in rushing yards allowed in all four of his seasons as the Ravens’ DC. The Giants ranked 27th and 29th against the run in Martindale’s two seasons in New York.
For all of the money and draft assets Schoen has poured into the defense in his four years as GM, he has never placed a priority on stopping the run. Schoen has made 14 picks on the first two days of his four drafts. He has only used one of those picks on a defensive tackle — third-rounder Darius Alexander this year — and no picks on an inside linebacker.
Schoen dealt away Pro Bowl defensive tackle Leonard Williams at the 2023 trade deadline and has tried unsuccessfully to fill that void with veteran stopgaps. The lone splash Schoen made to the spine of the front seven was the four-year, $40 million contract for inside linebacker Bobby Okereke in the 2023 offseason. Okereke was a standout in his first year in New York, but the 29-year-old’s play has fallen off a cliff over the past two seasons.
With Bowen being retained after last season, the only way to expect the run defense to improve was to upgrade the personnel. But Schoen instead focused on splashy additions to address the pass defense. The result is a run defense that has fallen into disrepair.
Now, the Giants are turning to outside linebackers coach Charlie Bullen as the interim defensive coordinator for the final five games. It’s an interesting choice, since Bullen has no experience as a DC. Meanwhile, defensive line coach Andre Patterson was the co-defensive coordinator for the Vikings for two seasons and secondary coach/pass game coordinator Marquand Manuel was the Falcons’ DC for two seasons. Bullen, who joined the Giants’ staff last year, does have ties to Schoen, as they overlapped in various roles for the Dolphins from 2012-16.
Kafka took ownership of the decision to fire Bowen, acknowledging that he had conversations with Schoen before making the move to “make sure that we’re both on the same page and united on it.” Schoen is intimately involved with every decision to the point that Kafka said he consulted the GM on the trick plays the Giants ran in Sunday’s game.
It’s unfair to expect Bullen to work miracles given the hand he’s been dealt. But he has five games to show that the defensive failings are the result of coaching and not talent. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how Schoen can survive.
