Giants Do the Sensible by Trading Leonard Williams for Draft Picks

New York has a chance to build a program the right way under Brian Daboll, no matter how impatient the fan base might be.

The only part of Sunday more laughable than the sarcastically melodramatic finish of the Snoopy Bowl was the moment when Giants fans decided to make the loss some kind of referendum on Brian Daboll who, just a year ago, won the NFL’s Coach of the Year award.

This is typical of the fan base that, somewhat infamously, tried to run off Tom Coughlin myriad times before, and in between a pair of Super Bowl wins, and certainly after them, despite the fact that the organization has been hopelessly adrift ever since. Now because Daboll, who plucked his third-string quarterback off the Jersey Shore, played a conservative game in an intermittent downpour, he’s apparently got something to answer for.

Here’s the reality: Daboll overcoached a team that was meant to look, in 2022, what it looks like in ’23. Thankfully, the Giants realized as much and suspended their collective delusions, breaking open the trade deadline with a deal that sent Leonard Williams to the Seahawks for second- and fifth-round picks. This is proof that the Giants understand what the fan base cannot: They have something special here, and it’s time to give their coaching staff the runway to build an actual winning football team.

The Giants were never going to find out what they had in Daboll and, more broadly, general manager Joe Schoen, until they rid the franchise of the Dave Gettleman roster-building philosophy that earned the Giants a new coach and general manager in the first place. Gettleman was able to lord over multiple coaching staffs and torpedo a handful of careers before they’d even gotten started. Thankfully, that transitional process is now underway, and, hopefully for the Giants, Williams will not be the last player exchanged for future draft capital over the next 24 hours.

Daboll inherited one of the worst rosters in the NFL last year and, with a little ingenuity, a little bit of late-game luck and a resurgent, healthy campaign from Saquon Barkley and a YOLO defense run by Wink Martindale that caught a few teams under the chin by surprise, the team crawled into the playoffs via a weak NFC field and beat the also notoriously lucky Vikings in the first round. Understandably, this changed the perception of the team, even though the bones coming into the 2023 season were nearly identical.

Now, like every other major sporting figure in the Greater New York City area, Daboll, having not turned water into wine over the course of the last eight weeks, is due for a flogging. How exhausting it must be to think this way.

The Giants obviously don’t see it that way. Trading Williams is an acknowledgment of threadbare depth, which was partially the result of years of mismanaging equity and assets, even though, to Gettleman’s credit, the team did have multiple first-round picks twice during his tenure (three in 2019: Daniel Jones, Dexter Lawrence and Deandre Baker; and an additional pick in ’22 acquired via trade by Gettleman before his retirement, even though Schoen ended up making the picks).

It is a nod to Schoen, who now has to do what two of his predecessors could not: Win the middle and late rounds, and build an affordable roster core, much like the Giants had during their two Super Bowl wins in 2007 and ’11.

It is also an elixir for this kind of superfluous overreaction we’re having to 2023. Daniel Jones has missed three games and will come back with a neck issue that may, in some respect, limit his ability or willingness to run (which, when brought out by Daboll, turned out to be Jones’s greatest asset). Andrew Thomas has played in one game. Evan Neal has missed two, and, while the jury is most certainly out on last year’s No. 7 pick, any length of time with which he’s had to develop has been impacted by injury. The current starting offensive line is harder to identify in public than an unmasked member of Daft Punk.

I can’t promise that Daboll will ultimately deliver, as his success will be dependent on so many variables, but I can promise that sitting out this trade deadline would have been a historic mistake for the Giants.