The New York Giants are coming off a successful season in which they qualified for the postseason for the first time since 2016. First-year general manager Joe Schoen knows there is still much work to be done.
Schoen’s goal is to sustain success for the haul by building a talent-rich roster while maintaining enough financial flexibility to make moves if needed.
“This is a special team to me,” Schoen said in his presser on Monday. “It was my first year. We’d like to have all the guys back, I really would. But there’s a business side to it. There are rules that you need to operate under in terms of the salary cap.”
That being said, Schoen will have to make more difficult decisions this offseason, some of which may not be popular with fans. The Giants have 18 veterans on their current roster that will become unrestricted free agents come March, including quarterback Daniel Jones, running back Saquon Barkley, and safety Julian Love.
“We’re going to meet as a staff on Thursday,” Schoen said. “We’ve got all-star games coming up. The last couple of days have been a lot of — we did exit meetings yesterday with the entire football team, each player individually, working on calendars as we move forward the next couple weeks, so we mirror personnel calendars with the coaches. We’ll have those meetings on Thursday, and those will continue through the weekend.”
Schoen was guarded in his responses to which players he was leaning on re-signing, only stating that the salary cap would dictate many of those decisions.
“We’ve got to go through the entire roster, we have a lot of UFAs. We have guys that are good players that have contracts on the horizon. That’s all part of the planning that we’ll go through. And again, we just got to talk about how we want to divvy it up and prioritize different areas. And if we need to open up money, we won’t rule that out,” he said.
As for Love, the team’s leading tackler this season, Schoen knows his value and is aware of how much he means to the Giants, but again, made no promises.
“He’s a guy — I know he mentioned it yesterday — that we talked to in the bye week. And we weren’t able to get something done with Julian,” Schoen said. “Julian knows how we feel about him. We had a good exit interview with him yesterday. Again, as we start to get into the offseason planning, we’ll talk to the coaches. We’ll see where he fits in. And if we can get something done, that’ll be good.”
Schoen also talked about other impending free agents such as oft-injured wide receiver Sterling Shepard, calling the veteran “awesome” and “one of my favorite players here.”
Schoen even addressed Odell Beckham Jr., who he had dinner with but on the other side of the coin intimated that a No. 1 wide receiver isn’t a necessity.
“I know a number one wide receiver can be important, but there are some number one wide receivers that are home right now. You can go through this past weekend; you can go through a couple of weekends ago in the playoffs. A number one receiver doesn’t guarantee you anything,” Schoen said. “I think it’s important that we continue to build the team, and there’s multiple positions where we want to upgrade throughout the offseason. So, yeah, I’d love to have a number one wide receiver. But we’ve got to place value on everything we do, and if it makes sense, that’s something we’ll look to do.”
Ultimately, the GM added, there are some “difficult offseason decisions to make.”
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