For the Giants to reverse their downward spiral, they’ve got to start close to home

For the Giants to reverse their downward spiral, they’ve got to start close to home

Back in 2018, Ben McAdoo was in his first season as the head coach of the New York Giants. At 38, he was the second-youngest head coach in the league at the time. He was fond of his own unique sayings, and some of them were quite fun and appropriate. One of his go-to lines was this: “Farm your own land.”

The message was about dealing with what you can deal with and not what is beyond your horizon. The phrase also could relate to how a team needs to approach a season: Concern yourself first with those closest to you — the teams in your own division.

The Giants went 4-2 in the NFC East in McAdoo’s debut season, 11-5 overall, and made the playoffs. The farming was productive. Everything soured around him the next year, and he did not even make it out of the 2017 season, starting a spiral of change and unrest that has carried the Giants through four head coaches in a six-year period.  

One of the main reasons the Giants are where they are — down with dregs of the league — is that they have been unable to “farm their own land.’’ They have mostly stunk inside their own division. Pat Shurmur, in his two seasons, was 1-5 and 2-4 when confronting the NFC East landscape of the Cowboys, Eagles and Washington franchise. Joe Judge showed promise in 2020, going 4-2 within the division, but faltered to 1-5 in 2021. Brian Daboll won nine games and made the playoffs as a first-year head coach in 2022, but the Giants were just 1-4-1 in the division. They were 3-3 in 2023 and bottomed out in 2024, going 0-6 in the NFC East for their first winless season in the division ever.

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