Joe Schoen hopes Giants' team chemistry continues
Giants general manager Joe Schoen speaks during a news conference at the NFL Combine on Tuesday in Indianapolis. Credit: AP/Darron Cummings
INDIANAPOLIS – This NFL Combine clearly has a different feel for Giants’ second-year general manager Joe Schoen.
For one thing, he now knows the players.
A year ago, every player on the roster was, if not a stranger to Schoen, close to it.
“That’s the unfortunate part of this business because it was a special season last year,” Schoen said Tuesday. “It was Dabs [Brian Daboll] and my first year and we did become close with a lot of the players.”
He added that the 2022 Giants had “very good team chemistry from Day 1.” Clearly that’s the goal again for the 2023 edition.
Keeping Love?
Asked if he is “confident” that a new deal will be worked out with safety Julian Love, Schoen said: “We’ll see. I think I saw a couple of safeties may be released, so we’ll see what that market looks like, and if there’s gonna be a surplus or not, and where his value falls. We love Julian.”
Will Williams take less money?
Late in the season, Leonard Williams indicated he would be amenable to a pay cut to remain a Giant. Schoen surely will try to convince Williams and his agent to do so. “We’ll talk to him,” Schoen said. “[The media] did a good job of trying to get him to take a pay cut. Again, Leo’s still a good player and it’s not a position where we’re very deep, so we’ve got some ideas in mind where we can open up some money, and that’s something we’ll work on as we go through the week.”
Opening for a QB
With third-string QB Davis Webb retiring – and joining the Broncos coaching staff – the Giants have a need for another quarterback.
“We’re always going to look in the draft [for a QB] regardless, and then if there’s a UFA out there that maybe we like, and he can come in and compete for a job, we’ll do that too,” Schoen said. “That’ll be something we address.”
Keeping leaders
Schoen indicated he wants to maintain “leadership” among the offensive linemen. That seems to bode well for Nick Gates and Jon Feliciano returning to the line, as either backups or starters.
“We had Feliciano in Buffalo with us, and it’s not just on the field with some of these guys. Leadership in the locker room and within their position group that you really got to make sure you don’t let a lot of leadership walk out of the building, and that’s gonna be a concerted effort for some of these guys – backups, starters, whatever it may be, we want to retain some of our leadership.”
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
