Valentine’s Views: Random thoughts for an offseason Sunday

What a week!

The Super Bowl is just an unpleasant memory. The 2017 New York Giants season an even worse, more distant memory. The NFL Combine doesn’t start for a few more days. Free agency and the 2018 NFL Draft are still off in the distance.

Yet, at Big Blue View HQ it sure didn’t feel like an ordinary, slow, February offseason week. It felt like a whirlwind of activity that had my balding head spinning. Some of that was Giants-related, some site-related and some was just social media madness-related.

Let’s review.

‘Locked on Giants’ podcast launches

After 148 episodes of ‘Big Blue Chat,’ Pat Traina and I moved our show to the ‘Locked on Sports’ network as co-hosts of ‘Locked on Giants.’ The older you get, the harder it is to deal with major change and this has been a nerve-wracking week as we got used to the changes in routine.

It’s been fun, though, and I hope those of you who have listened are enjoying the show. Have to admit it was kind of a nice ego boost to check the ITunes stats for Thursday’s show with Sage Rosenfels and find that our show was downloaded more often than Peter King’s ‘MMQB Podcast.’ Small victory, but we will take it.

You can listen to the show here. You can also find us on ITunes, or subscribe via RSS.

Fun with Marcus Peters

Giants, and Chiefs, Twitter lost their collective minds when I tossed out the idea of building a trade around Chiefs’ All-Pro cornerback Marcus Peters and Giants’ cornerback Eli Apple. The Chiefs would NEVER trade Peters, a 25-year-old who is one of the best corners in the game! Yeah, he’s a knucklehead, but he’s soooo good! They especially wouldn’t do it for Apple, who had all manner of difficulties with coaches and teammates last season!

Even for Twitter standards the @bigblueview timeline was filled with all sorts of craziness after that post. This probably got a more emotional reaction that anything I have posted in quite a while.

Even after the Chiefs traded Peters — albeit to the Los Angeles Rams and not to the Giants for Apple — the craziness continued.

I have learned one thing in 35 years of writing (yes, it’s been that long). If you are going to make a living putting opinions or ideas out there for public consumption, you are going to be disagreed with. Sometimes, people are going to think you are downright off your rocker.

I just tried to have fun with it.

The big Giants news was ...

That there really wasn’t any news.

Teams around the league have begun making trades and cutting big-name players. The Giants? Crickets. Well, not quite crickets. The re-signing of veteran guard John Greco, the waiving of inconsequential linebacker Deontae Skinner and the bolting to the Dallas Cowboys by assistant strength and conditioning coach Markus Paul all happened.

Maybe it’s not really Giants news, but former team Vice President of Player Evaluation Marc Ross went on ‘NFL Live’ and had things to say about the quarterbacks in the 2018 draft class.

Oh, and we saw Davis Webb throw a few footballs to Evan Engram. Outdoors. In shorts. With no defense.

Final thoughts

• If you haven’t been reading the fantastic breakdowns of quarterbacks in the 2018 draft class that Dan Pizzuta has been putting together you are missing out. Here are links to all of the ones posted thus far: [Sam Darnold | Josh Rosen | Baker Mayfield]
• Chris Pflum has already cranked out more than three dozen NFL Draft prospect profiles. Want to know if certain prospects fit the Giants? Chris has you covered.
• Free agency is coming. Here is a list of potential Giants’ free agents. Pat Traina broke down the estimated market value of some of the team’s top free agents.