The New York Giants aren’t getting the cream of the crop these days when it comes to coaching and hopefully that will change going forward. One candidate for a job on new head coach Joe Judge’s staff could be former Cleveland Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens, who was fired after one season at the helm.
Judge and Kitchens go back a ways to the mid-2000s when Judge was a graduate assistant at Mississippi State and Kitchens was the tight ends and running backs coach.
Judge recalled helping Kitchens assemble a swing set for his children, a task that didn’t go as smoothly as planned.
“So we’re thinking all right, bye week. It’s Sunday. We’ll be out of here 2 in the afternoon,” Judge recalled in an interview during Super Bowl week last year. “We’ll get a swing set put together. Shoot, we’ll be done by 5 o’clock, eating dinner still home.”
If it were only that easy. The coaching business has endless hours and duty called, delaying the project.
“We don’t get out of work until about 8 o’clock that night,” Judge said. “We’re over at Freddie’s house putting together a swing set until 11 o’clock that night. That was on Sunday. We finally finish that thing on Thursday night, working until 11 or midnight every night.”
Judge said he inherited the swing set when Kitchens was hired away from MSU by the Dallas Cowboys to be their tight ends coach in 2006. He also spoke highly of Kitchens in retrospect.
“Freddie, took care of us and gave us money we didn’t make money as GAs,” he said.
With Kitchens now on the market and the Giants looking to fill out a staff, it might be beneficial for Judge to pay back Kitchens and bring him aboard in some capacity. Kitchens went through a hellish season Cleveland and now knows what the depths of the NFL looks like. He could possibly help Judge navigate the pitfalls that did him in as a head coach.