GM Dave Gettleman’s priority: Improve Giants’ offensive line
New Giants general manager media Dave Gettleman speaks to members of the media at the Giants training facility in East Rutherford, New Jersey on Dec. 29, 2017. Credit: Patrick E. McCarthy
It’s one thing for an average homeowner to say his or her kitchen needs to be upgraded. Everyone can use a little more cabinet and counter space, some updated appliances, a new décor. When those estimates start rolling in for the overhaul, though, a lot of hopes and plans get tossed aside in the name of economics. Concessions are made. The old fridge that still works might not look all that bad.
That’s where Dave Gettleman and the Giants are right now. When he was hired as general manager in December, Gettleman made it clear that priority number one was fixing an offensive line that has been an eyesore during the past few years. He even hired a head coach in Pat Shurmur who apparently clinched the job when he talked about how the Vikings “didn’t change the oil, we changed the transmission” in their revamping of the O-line last offseason.
Gettleman has had a couple of months to brainstorm how he’ll do it. He also has $24.2 million in salary-cap space, calculated before the trade for linebacker Alec Ogletree becomes official on Wednesday and any veteran cuts he has planned. Now it’s time to see which of those ideas are worth the big bucks, what the Giants are willing to pay for, and what the next generation of Giants offensive linemen will look like after gutting the old one down to the studs.
Free agency begins on Wednesday, after a two-day window for talks with available players that begins on Monday, and the Giants figure to be spending a lot of time shopping in the O-line aisle. The big prize in this market is Panthers guard Andrew Norwell, whom Gettleman signed as an undrafted rookie in Carolina and watched as he blossomed into a Pro Bowl player.
Any negotiations with Norwell this week will be in a different financial stratosphere from the last time Gettleman and Norwell struck a deal. There is talk he could get close to $13 million per season.
“Listen, it’s the market,” Gettleman said of the rising cost of interior offensive linemen when he spoke at the Combine last week. “Is that car worth $150,000? If someone buys it [for that price], I guess it’s worth it, you know what I mean? This is no different.”
Buying the sports car, though, seems to go against Gettleman’s basic philosophies. He’s more interested in panning for unheralded players than paying established ones. He was the director of pro personnel who pushed for the Giants to sign a little-known center from the Browns named Shaun O’Hara. He was part of the front office that found David Diehl in the fourth round of the draft and signed Rich Seubert as an undrafted free agent. All of those players became bedrocks for a championship team.
“It isn’t necessarily that you have to sign the stars or whatever,” Gettleman said in January. “You have to work at the evaluation process. You have to grind through the tape because there are guys there. There always are . . . There’s always guys there that can play that have been underlooked.”
There’s a good chance many of the linemen the Giants sign in this free-agency period won’t be household names (or as close to household names as offensive linemen can be). Instead, they’ll be players in whom Gettleman sees something he can use without having to overpay for their services.
Formica countertops rather than the granite, in other words.
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.
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