Giants’ Dave Gettleman: Virtual meetings eliminate the personal touchpoint

New York Giants GM Dave Gettleman has adapted to the virtual world just fine, but still misses the personal interaction of player meetings.

Executive members of the New York Giants, just like everyone else across the country, are currently confined to their individual residences as part of stay-at-home orders issued due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of that, the Giants have made substantial changes to their offseason process, no longer attending Pro Days or hosting prospects for visits and workouts on the MetLife Stadium grounds.

Instead, the Giants have relied heavily on their large and well-rounded technology team, which has completely revamped their everyday approach.

“We’ve done our best to mimic business as usual,” assistant general manager Kevin Abrams said on a Monday conference call. “Obviously, it’s not. But without going into details about what technologies we’re using — I don’t think our IT department would appreciate that — we’ve tried to mimic how our meetings typically operate, both for the coaches and for our scouting meetings right now. The fact that it’s all been virtual is obviously the biggest difference. But the dialogue, the conversation, the agenda, the itineraries for the meetings go as always. I don’t think we’ve missed a beat.

“A lot of that goes to Justin Warren in our IT department, Ty Siam in Football Tech, Eddie Triggs is running our operations. It hasn’t been perfectly smooth, but it’s been smoother than anyone could have expected. Whatever hiccups we’ve encountered, I think everyone has shown patience and the ability to adjust so we can get to operating the way that we need to. It’s been pretty exceptional so far, and a lot of people deserve a lot of credit. People that wouldn’t normally get recognized.”

This has obviously been a big change for the 69-year-old Gettleman, who is very big on face-to-face meetings and personal interactions. However, he’s adjusted to this new world and doesn’t appear to have missed a beat.

“We’re really making it work. One of the exciting things for me as an old man working with these young guys and the technology, they’re really thoughtful and intentional about it,” Gettleman said. “Really, Chris Pettit has done a great job, our Director of College Scouting, in terms of coordinating all this, working with Ty and Ed Triggs and Justin Warren, has just done yeoman’s work with us. We’re moving along. Listen, there are people in a lot worse situations than us. We’re thankful and we’re moving along. We’re going to get this right.”

It’s not all peaches and cream, though. As well as Gettleman has adjusted to the virtual world, he still feels like something is lost in translation when conducting player and prospect interviews — mainly the smell and touch.

“[The one-hour video calls] been pretty beneficial because again, it is FaceTiming, so thank God, you can see the guys. I’m a city kid and a big believer in body language and all this and that,” Gettleman said. “It’s okay. It’s not great, it’s not perfect, it’s okay. For me, what we miss is watching them interact, the 30 visit guys, watching them in your facility. That’s what you miss out on. By not having pro days, you also miss that personal contact. Watching guys among their peers and how they operate, how they’re received. That tells a lot when you just watch a kid in those circumstances.

“Obviously, when we would go to workouts, a lot of times the night before, our coach and scout that would be at the pro day would take one, two or three of the players out to dinner and have some conversation that way. We’re losing the personal touchpoints. We have the visual touchpoint, but we’re really missing out on the personal touchpoint, when you can smell or feel a guy.”

Abrams also acknowledged that something is lost in the virtual world.

“You do miss out on some of the depth of the interactions. But I think between the coaches’ interactions with the players, and the rest of us who have had opportunities to speak and see these guys, you do your best to get to know them as well as you can, knowing that it’s always going to be virtual. You’re not going to have them in your presence,” Abrams said.

Although life will eventually get back to normal, Gettleman and Abrams must continue to embrace the technological change. This is how operations will conducted for the foreseeable future and there’s no way around that.

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