After Super Bowl win, it gets tougher for Reese

Bob Glauber
March 2, 2008

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For Giants general manager Jerry Reese, free agency this year is starting off a lot like free agency last year. Only the names have changed.

Last year, it was sayonara to Luke Petitgout, Carlos Emmons, Jay Feely and Visanthe Shiancoe. This year, it's Kawika Mitchell, Reggie Torbor and Gibril Wilson.

The only constant is change. And there will be more to come.

"You try to do what's best for your team each year," Reese said. "If you think you can get the thing done through free agency, you try to get it done. If not, you know you're going to get draft picks and you try to do the best with the draft. It's different every year."

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At this point last year, Giants fans were going nuts because Reese was sitting on the sideline while the big money was going to the big-name free agents. But in the end, he put together a roster good enough to make a stunning Super Bowl run, one of the most unexpected championship seasons in recent memory.

Now it gets even harder. With plenty of roster issues to consume his offseason, Reese will try to duplicate the magic he helped set in motion last year.

Take it from someone who already has been there; it's a huge challenge.

"The key thing is to keep your core guys," said former Packers general manager Ron Wolf, whose team won the Super Bowl after the 1996 season, went back the next year, but lost to Denver. "That's what you try and do every year."

Easier said than done. Not only has Reese already lost three key free agents, but he faces potential contract hassles if and when defensive end Osi Umenyiora, wide receiver Plaxico Burress, left tackle David Diehl, and perhaps a few others step up and demand pay raises after the Super Bowl win.

"The great thing about being in professional football is it's a black-and-white business," Wolf said. "You're either good enough or not. If you're not good enough, you're going to be replaced. Regardless of what you think your worth is."

Wolf acknowledged that he ran into some problems in that regard, although he declined to cite specific examples.

"Where I got into problems myself is when I overrated people and suddenly spent too much money for them," he said. "You cannot do that in today's climate and I believe like everything else, as time goes on, the more you're in the business, the more you work with these types of things, the better you become at them.

"When I was coming up in the business, you always tried to reward the veteran player, give him another year, but you can't do that any more with the salary cap."

The bottom line: Reese must make decisions based not on what a player has done in the past, but what he's capable of doing in the future.

"It comes down to a matter of how valuable is this guy to the New York Giants," Wolf said. "If you're a core guy, you're valuable. If not, then where do you fit in? Every year, just about a third of the roster changes with all teams. You've got 16 or 17 guys every year being kicked out of there. So you have to be honest, and people don't like it when you're honest.

"You have to tell them what you really think. It's a bottom-line business. It's, 'How good are you? Can I go into this draft or through free agency or with a college free agent that I can replace you with?' If the answer to that is yes, the answer is, 'and we don't think you're quite as good you think you are,' then you have to say that."

Not easy. Especially after a championship season.

"That's a very difficult thing to do," Wolf said. "They've been through that whole thing with you. They took a team no one expected to do anything, and suddenly you're world champions. But you can't let that be part of your equation because you're in the front office. You can't be loyal, because you can end up hurting your team.

"The object is to do the best thing for the New York Giants. Not the best thing for your third wide receiver or your seventh offensive lineman. It's to do the best thing for the team. That's hard, because the human element is involved and you do have in your psyche the feeling of obligation to certain people. But you can't have that because your job is to put out the best possible 53 players for the New York Giants in the year 2008. You can never lose sight of that."

He learned from experience. "You realize what happened yesterday, but yesterday's dead and gone," Wolf said, "and tomorrow's out of sight."

Words to live by for the general manager of the defending Super Bowl champions. Especially as he tries to do it all over again in 2008.

POTENTIAL CONTRACT HASSLES?

Three Giants who may be seeking big pay hikes

David Diehl

Osi Umenyiora

Plaxico Burress

more in /sports/football/giants

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