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What Might a Plausible Coaching Change Scenario Look Like?

Restlessness is growing among Giants fans for changes in the coaching staff and/or front office given the team's 0-3 start and the generally undisciplined, uninspiring, and conservative brand of football we are seeing every Sunday. We look at teams that seemed to be about as bad and as far into the rebuilding process as we were at the start of the season (e.g., Denver, LA Chargers, Carolina, Cincinnati) and see them beginning to play winning and exciting football and wonder why we cannot do the same.

The subjects of such speculation are mostly GM Dave Gettleman, OC Jason Garrett, and most recently HC Joe Judge. Many people want one or more of them fired now. That is extremely unlikely to happen for several reasons:

Dave Gettleman: As time goes on, Gettleman's drafts are beginning to look worse rather than better, with the exception of Daniel Jones. But at this point in the season, there is little to be gained by making a change in GM. More to the point, if you fire a GM mid-season, which is a humiliating thing to do, what other executive will find the job attractive? Most likely, Gettleman will remain all season and then be given the chance to retire gracefully.

By the way, here are a few charts comparing Daniel Jones' performance this year to other starting QBs:

1. 3rd down performance in pure passing situations: Up there with the better QBs

2. For those of you who don't trust PFF grades, here is a comparison between them and an objective measure of how well a QB is performing. Jones' PFF grade is a little higher after 3 games than the best fit line suggests it should be, but by the objective measure he is still in the top half of QBs:

3. But he is hamstrung by the Giants' insistence on running the ball on 2nd-and-long compared to other teams:

So criticize Gettleman for how players like Hernandez, Carter, Lawrence, Ximines, even McKinney so far have not become stars. And definitely rightly criticize him for not having fixed the OL "once and for all," even though (crossing my fingers) Andrew Thomas may be on the way to fixing LT. But Jones may turn out to have been a good pick.

Jason Garrett: This has to be the most likely candidate for a change. His conservative play-calling and seeming inability to get the best out of the talent he has in order to run the offense he likes flies in the face of Judge's "Tell me what he CAN do" mantra. But again, if you fire someone after 3 games, what promising young coach is going to want to take that position? Most likely, Garrett finishes the season and is then replaced.

But there is one possible alternative scenario. Judge showed last year that he was willing to make a coaching change in mid-season when he fired OL coach Marc Colombo. That of course was due to insubordination by Colombo combined with the atrocious play of the OL. I don't expect to see a scenario like that unfold. There is no evidence of friction between the two, and Garrett's conservative approach does not even seem to be out of tune with Judge's personality given his approach to 4th downs.

The Giants' next 6 opponents are @NO, @DAL, LAR, CAR, @KC, LV. The Giants will almost surely be underdogs in each of these games, and while a couple of them may be winnable, it's also not out of the question that we get to 0-9 with the BYE week looming after the LV game. If we do go 0-9, and if we look bad on offense doing so, then replacing Garrett during the BYE becomes more likely.

But who might Garrett's replacement be? A mid-season change really limits the pool of candidates one can choose from. There is however an interesting recent precedent. In 2018 the Cleveland Browns fired HC Hue Jackson and OC Todd Haley after 8 games. Freddie Kitchens was appointed HC, and apparently did an excellent job, going 5-3 and helping Baker Mayfield improve. At the time he was heralded for making the offense more innovative and QB-friendly, even stealing some ideas from the Sean McVay playbook:

https://touchdownwire.usatoday.com/2018/11/27/the-all-22-how-new-offensive-coordinator-freddie-kitchens-became-the-browns-mvp/2/

Kitchens was made HC after that but had a disastrous 2019 season and was promptly fired when it ended. Since then the players he coached have mostly ridiculed his tenure, and the word was that he was in over his head at that time:

https://www.si.com/nfl/browns/browns-maven-features/cleveland-browns-learning-from-the-freddie-kitchens-experiment

But he was hired by good friend Judge as TE coach last year, and this year was promoted to "Senior offensive assistant" (whatever that is). Surely if Judge fires Garrett, Kitchens will be his replacement. Will that be a good thing, Giants fans? Which do you believe, the good things said about him as Browns' OC in 2018 or the terrible things said about him as Browns HC in 2019 (when he continued to call the plays himself)?

On the other hand, if the Giants wait until the season is over, the pool of candidates will be much larger.

Joe Judge: Until this past week, I had thought that Judge was safe through this season and probably next. After the Atlanta game, and especially after his tone-deaf pressers this week, I'm not so sure. The tough guy, taskmaster thing is not the issue. The players seems to have bought into that and as far as we can tell they support him. It's the game decisions and his defense of them that are the issue. The fact is that for several years now, the most successful NFL franchises have been those that use modern offensive philosophies that try to use the entire field and combination routes to get DBs into conflict and thus get receivers into space with opportunities not only for receptions but YAC. Most of the successful franchises emphasize the passing game over the running game and never run on 2nd-and-long. The few that still emphasize the run either have a dominant RB (e.g., Tennessee, Derrick Henry) or an other-worldly running QB (Baltimore, Lamar Jackson). Most of the successful franchises go for it on 4th down more than expected. The Giants are part of a cluster of teams, most of them unsuccessful, that so far have gone for it less often that expected, even though on the rare occasion that we do, the result has been pretty good:

Specifically:

Thus, Judge's statement at today's presser that "I'm not afraid to go for it on 4th down" is not supported by the data.

And here is a chart that shows that going for FGs rather than 1st downs on 4th down, as we did so often in the WFT game, is costing us noticeably in the probability that we win the game:

I seriously doubt that Judge is fired before the end of the season. But if we go say 3-13? Good chance. In particular, if Mara hires a new GM at the end of the season, surely that person will want to hire his own HC. The best GM candidates will demand it as a condition of taking the job. The best conceivable situation for luring a top-flight GM candidate would be (1) autonomy to select the HC; (2) autonomy to release or not re-sign any player the GM wishes to in order to create cap space; (3) 2 top-10 round 1 picks, 5 in the top 100, and 10 overall; (3) Daniel Jones demonstrates this year that he is a keeper so that those 2 round 1 picks can be used on OL, EDGE, DB help, whatever we need the most.

Of course a bounceback from 0-3 to finish 10-7 and win the division would be the best thing. I'm still rooting for that.

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