Former New York Giants vice president of player evaluation, Marc Ross, is still throwing shade on his old organization several years after his dismissal.
Ross, now an NFL Network analyst said in a recent radio interview that the hiring of Joe Judge as the head coach over more qualified candidates (such as Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy) it was an “out of the blue” move by the Giants.
“When Joe Judge got hired over a guy like that, it was definitely a shock and a surprise with the limited resume that Joe Judge had,” Ross said on The Zach Gelb Show. “But I guess that’s what the Giants were trying to find in their culture, the tough-guy image that they’re trying to portray this year in the 2020 season.”
That tough guy image, says Ross, may not fly very far if the Giants don’t return to their winning ways this season. Judge has resorted to making players run laps as punishment for making mistakes in practice, a tactic his old boss in New England, Bill Belichick, was known to do.
“If you start out 0-3 and you’re still making guys run laps and you’re losing, [players will] say, ‘This is not really helping us win,’” Ross said. “These things that are kind of demeaning us and making us not about football, that’s not related to winning – that’s going to be tough to swallow for a lot of guys.”
Ross also stated that copying Belichick’s way of doing things may not work for a first-year coach who is nowhere near as established as the “one of a kind” Belichick. He also said the message might be lost on players who never had to run laps before in their young lives.
“If you lose and you’re making guys run laps and they have never done that in their life or haven’t done it since Pop Warner football,” Ross said. “That’s not going to sit well with grown men. The Giants have a lot of young players, so right now everyone is saying the right things, but if you lose the first couple games – the Giants have a very tough opening schedule.”
The Giants do have a tough schedule and a lot of internal newness to overcome before the season starts. Their first five games are against Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, the Los Angeles Rams and Dallas.
They also Dallas again, play Philadelphia twice and have games against Baltimore, Seattle, Arizona, Cleveland and Tampa Bay.
[lawrence-related id=654358,654356,654317]