Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula was willing to throw coaches and players under the bus on Wednesday to protect GM Brandon Beane, to protect himself and to protect the Bills’ comfortable way of doing things despite their consistently disappointing postseason results.
Pegula made clear his plan to fix the Bills is to just do more of the same. To point fingers at others on their way out the door, like fired coach Sean McDermott, or while they’re still in the building, like wide receiver Keon Coleman.
And to not only retain Beane but promote his GM to president of football operations.
If this sounds a lot like the Giants — minus all the football games the Bills have won — that’s because the Giants have played the same kind of calculated blame game to insulate their own while burying the reputations of others for more than a decade. Even if they’ve done it less obviously than Pegula did on Wednesday.
Joe Schoen‘s so-called collaboration with former head coach Brian Daboll ended a lot like his mentor Beane’s collaboration with McDermott, for example: With the coach looking for a new job, while the GM’s biggest responsibility the next day was to wear a nice suit and not freeze at the microphone.
The good news is that John Harbaugh’s hiring was designed to steer the Giants away from these bad organizational habits.
Giants ownership, represented on Tuesday by Chris Mara, recognized that the franchise could not keep doing things the same way.
Harbaugh required the power to have final say and to make sweeping changes to the Giants’ operation for the betterment of the team. And although it took convincing, the Mara family acknowledged that their recent way of operating hasn’t worked.
Their 29.5% winning percentage since the start of the 2017 NFL season certainly indicates that this would be an understatement.
But here is the asterisk, the qualifier to the sunny skies ahead promised by Harbaugh’s hiring:
He will only change the Giants if he takes action, if he makes significant changes, if he gets the wrong people out of there and — most importantly — if he does it now.
There can be no half-measures. There can be no delay. There can be no protection of tenured employees for the sake of relationships.
And Harbaugh will never have the capital he possesses now in the building again unless he does one day lead the Giants to a Super Bowl.
Demoting Schoen and stripping him of personnel power, for example, is a better result than promoting him like the Bills did with Beane. But retaining Schoen is a half-measure.
It is a political favor from Harbaugh to Schoen’s guardian angels and protectors that keeps a holdover with some powerful allies, his own agenda and a poor track record in the hallways of the building.
Imagine then that Harbaugh is considering major changes to the training and strength staffs, public relations and the video and analytics departments — and numerous sources have said to expect just that.
Harbaugh could fire important people in those departments outright or, as some have suggested, he could promote or reassign certain people to abstract emeritus roles. This would be a way to keep someone in the building while taking away their power more delicately.
Granted, some situations require a softer touch than others. Not every change can be accomplished with mandates and a blowtorch.
However, what Harbaugh has to understand is that half measures will not fix the Giants. Keeping those people in the building will lead to undermining when things go wrong.
The problems need to be ripped out at the root. If those weeds are only snapped off above ground but they linger in the soil, they’ll just grow back.
Back in 2022, when John Mara and Steve Tisch hired Schoen and Daboll away from the Bills’ organization, the Giants understood that they needed to go outside the family to find solutions at GM and head coach.
But Schoen and Daboll, it turned out, had a lot of the same bad habits the Giants organization did and were too inexperienced to know what they didn’t know. They enabled the Giants’ worst qualities and folded comfortably into the franchise’s dangerous habits rather than identifying them as problematic and changing them.
A team like Pegula’s Buffalo Bills that won five straight division titles from 2020-24 and finished 12-5 this season, is not desperate enough to think they need to change their ways. They’ve been to the playoffs seven straight years.
The Giants at least hit rock bottom, prompting the Maras and Tisches to hire and empower Harbaugh because they need credibility and stability.
Harbaugh must act swiftly and harshly, though, in delivering the change the Giants need. He is not here to become one of them. He is here to change them.
If he hesitates or settles for half-measures, he could inadvertently fold into the Giants’ same-old dangerous ways.
And if that happens, the Giants will be lucky to one day even be the Bills.