Kenny Golladay can help Giants by not being a distraction
Kenny Golladay of the New York Giants looks on from the bench in the second half against the Houston Texans at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Kenny Golladay’s biggest contribution to the Giants this season came after Sunday’s game.
The wide receiver was pacing around an otherwise jubilant locker room like a volcano ready to spew lava all over the celebration. The Giants had just beaten the Texans to improve to 7-2, one of their best records through nine games in the last three decades, but Golladay played almost no part in it.
He was targeted twice in the first half with passes he could have caught but did not — one a difficult sideline play and the other a more egregious drop on a crossing route — and was benched in the second half in favor of a player the Giants claimed off waivers during their bye week.
Isaiah Hodgins, a 6-3 dead ringer for the 6-4 Golladay in uniform (except younger and much cheaper), wound up catching two passes for 41 yards in his Giants debut. That, by the way, eclipsed Golladay’s production for this whole season. He has two catches for 22 yards.
But somewhere between the showers and the training room, whatever was gurgling inside Mount Golladay came to an uneasy peace. There was no eruption. No angry tantrum. No lashing out at the fans who booed him off the field or complaints about the coaching staff.
He just stood there at his locker, agreed somewhat with those who were frustrated with him (“It’s definitely unacceptable,” he said of his performance), and over the course of several minutes answered as many questions about his game, his season and his shockingly disappointing tenure with the Giants as he could.
“Me knowing the type of player I can be and what I want to put out there on the field, and what’s been going on this year, that’s the hard part,” Golladay said. “It’s tough. I’m going to keep pushing through, though.”
Asked if he agreed with the decision to bench him, he said it “really doesn’t matter” and chose to “keep that comment to myself.”
That’s the best the Giants can hope for from Golladay. The idea of contributing on the field has dwindled away to nothing, and the player who once led the NFL with 11 touchdown catches but has yet to reach the end zone in a year and a half with the Giants probably will end his stint with the team that way.
What they need him to do now is keep quiet, stay focused and try not to interfere with any of the positive mojo as this team heads into the back end of its schedule. They cannot afford for him to become a distraction. Not when everything else is clicking the way it is.
That may become more and more challenging as the Giants run out of options with him in their game plans. The next step is to possibly make him a healthy scratch in one of these upcoming games . . . perhaps even Sunday against the Lions, his former team. Ouch.
For a receiver who earns about three quarters of a million bucks a week in base salary (or to put it another way, about what Hodgins is due to earn for the entire season), that’s a challenging call to make. It is one that Brian Daboll has been steering toward since the summer, though, when he would talk about ignoring draft status and salary charts and using the players who earn their time on the field.
“You never know what can happen week to week,” Daboll said Sunday of Golladay’s immediate future, reiterating those summertime philosophies in his advice to him. “Go out there, try to have a good week of practice and take it day by day.”
As he stood there in the middle of the Sunday party, surrounded by teammates basking in the win, his simmering having given way to a more sullen disposition, Golladay transformed into something few players who sign $72 million contracts ever become. He was nearly a sympathetic figure.
He looked lost, confused and dismayed that he was unable to share in the elation from the victory. After spending the previous three seasons on teams that won three, five and four games, he finally is on a squad finding success . . . but unable to taste it himself.
“Of course I didn’t expect what’s going on right now,” he said, noting that he doesn’t know why his time with the Giants has been so unproductive. “[I’ll] stay mentally locked in. That’s it.”
If he does, he can rightly share in any laurels the team winds up achieving even if he has little to do with it on the field. If he can’t, he’ll become a villain in this tale.
Golladay can’t seem to hold on to the football for the Giants. The least he can do for them to earn his megamoney is hold his tongue.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
