The Giants Emotional Roller Coaster
Man it’s been a weird several months as a Giants fan. Fans of small-market teams love to whine about biases and not getting enough love but if they understood the amount of slop you also have to put up with in exchange for a few more primetime games maybe they’d pipe down. Every minor thing makes stupid news.
Daboll got let go the excitement started, only for Joe Schoen to stick around. Most of us saw Schoen and Daboll as a package deal, and Schoen had probably built a resume of more losses than wins. Not letting Schoen go was a surprise. Had he thrown Daboll under the bus to keep his job? I dunno.
Then the Giants went out and nabbed the cream of the coaching crop: John Harbaugh. This is where being a big market team has its true advantage. Despite spending over a decade as a laughing stock the Giants still have the aura to land a big name if they go for it. On top of that, Harbaugh basically wins a power struggle with Schoen, giving much of his duties to his own Dawn Aponte. Schoen feels like he’s just Harbaugh’s soldier now. Okay. That’s neat.
Then Todd Monken takes the Browns job instead of coming with Harbaugh and in the aftermath the Giants end up with Matt Nagy, who nobody has been excited to see for years. They also pick up Greg Roman, who the other Harbaugh just fired. Offensive coaching not looking super great.
Then fucking Steve Tisch, the quiet and often forgotten co-owner, is outed as a creep in the Epstein files release. Cool. Great. Love that. But in a development I did not expect, Tisch actually makes a deal to transfer his shares to his kids. It’s not prison or even selling, but when I had rock bottom expectations for anything happening, I’ll take what I can get. Fuck off forever, loser.
Free Agency wasn’t sexy but it was pleasant. Resigned Jermaine Elumenor, which is huge. Nabbed a few Ravens players. Did a lot of run defense work. No stupid deals, sensible moves. No major losses. Then all-star Dexter Lawrence reaches a breaking point and demands out. Fuck. The Giants get forced into dealing him quickly to maximize return and nab the #10 pick out of the deal.
The draft was pretty good. Arvell Reese fell to us, and Francis Mauigoa was a big fat lineman who should help shore up the run game and protect Dart. I wanted Downs, but I can’t complain.
Joe Schoen just got an extension announced last week. I guess that means he’s not a lame duck but does in fact work well with Harbaugh. Hard to say what to think, his role is still reduced but if we are stuck with him I guess I have to hope that Daboll really was most of the problem. I’ve defended Schoen before especially as his tenure was given more time, I’m willing to see if he can keep going up.
Then we come to the thing that got everyone chatting. Trump held a conference thing or whatever in New York (I don’t really care what it was) and Dart came out to introduce him, publicly aligning himself with one side of the spectrum in a world where doing that will immediately cause an uproar no matter the side you pick.
My reaction was disappointment but not shock. He’s a rich kid Mormon from Utah who went to what is usually considered one of the most racist colleges in the country. The chances he was going to be woke were roughly the same chances an alien makes contact with earth tomorrow and that alien looks like Vince Lombardi. Not impossible, but come on.
What we can mock though is that his political instincts are about as shit as his self-preservation instincts. This is not a good time to remove all doubt and visibly sidle up to Trump. The other players who have endorsed him did so when Trump had momentum and was still doing well, relatively speaking. Mason Ruldoph introduced him on the campaign trail, a normal time to do that sort of thing. Barkley went golfing with him very early in his second term when the right was riding high. Right now his approval is in the toilet, the idiotic Iran war nobody wanted that has made life worse for everyone for no reason has resulted in a guy that only his immediate cult members are happy to support. This is the right time to keep your opinions on the down low so you can claim plausible deniability or apoliticalness if things get worse, not walk out onto the deck of the ship into oncoming cannon fire.
On top of that, Dart plays for a team that represents NYC, a very blue place with the most openly progressive mayor in the country. Just to head off the chucklefucks who are inevitably going to re-use the same jersey joke: Northeast Jersey is also blue.
Dart just went out there into a naked bootleg scramble with nobody open and 3 linebackers rushing him. The political instincts you’d expect for a guy who has already cultivated a reputation for being an idiot frat bro destined for brain damage. People are calling him J-6 now, and I heartily endorse this nickname.
Do I want him off the team? No. If you are a left-leaning football fan one of the sad realities you have to cope with is a lot of our favorite guys are probably republicans, especially white QBs. Eli also went to Ole Miss and grew up in Louisiana. I am under no illusions we probably vote for different people. I’m also not going to tell him to stick to sports, it would be hypocritical to only say that to people I disagree with. He can express himself how he chooses.
But I will still call him an idiot dumbass for being an idiot dumbass. Real blockhead shit. Just go and paint a target on your back for no reason, quality stuff. You went from stupid (endearing) to stupid (derogatory).
At least Abdul Carter seems cool!
I wouldn’t know anything about this. *quietly moves picture of Bo Nix standing and smiling next to Charlie Kirk out of camera view*
Yeah, it’s definitely a feeling. The constant roster changes and inconsistent coaching make it hard to get invested, doesn’t it?
Lamar Jackson is probably an antivaxxer based on his behavior during covid but unlike A-aron (and Jaxon, relevant to the post) he has the instinct to not parade it around and tank his brand for no reason
Gotta wonder what Kaepernick is thinking, he got blackballed for simply promoting the idea that police brutality is bad, and yet it’s currently cool for a player to do meet and greets with the world’s most hated man.
I’ve been trying to not think about this one for the last few days. Sigh. This is the kind of shit that’s going to make me stop being a Giants fan. My *IMMEDIATE* reaction is I officially no longer give a fuck about this kid, and I’m not even sure that I WANT him to find any NFL success until he fully and completely understands what a f@#%g moron he is. He has IMMEDIATELY lost my support, and if he breaks his neck on the field and his career ends next year… I kind of won’t give one flying f@#%. One of (the many) reasons I’ve crapped on Tom Brady over the years is for admitting Trump was his friend and having the complete lack of intelligence to have his book in his locker with the press around.
For all the reasons you mentioned, this is just SOOOOOOOOO much worse. If you are f!@$*(&g dumb enough to think Taco Trumpass is somehow performing his job at even a BASIC level of competence and not a Wanna-Be Dictator… ok, well, maybe I can write that off as a few too many hits to the head or he’s just so excited about the breaks he’s given the rich. But to go on a f!@#%&g STAGE and endorse this moronic putz publicly?!? It shows a COMPLETE lack of understanding of how the NY media world works, it shows that the people around him are either part of the cult or that he’s so f#$%&!g stubbornly stupid that he’s willing to completely ignore their advice that this was career suicide.
JFC. We have kid birthdays on 1/6, so I refuse to call him anything in reference to that date, but holy f@#, I really won’t complain if he takes off running for an extra 3 yards and gets his head re-arranged. I’m already having a hard time that Harbaugh has coyly referenced Trump as someone he enjoyed meeting, but f@#$# A. I’m just going to start calling him Jax UnSmart.
Yeah, people are more than free to support whomever they feel best supports their interests. I’d be interested to know if Dart could even remotely articulate why he supports Dear Leader without resorting to the usual vague-isms. I’m sure it’s purley cosmetic given how perfectly Dart falls into so many stereotypical buckets: white, QB, from Utah, Mormon, went to Ole Miss, grew up fairly wealthy. He’s exactly who you’d expect to support Trump because that’s “his team”. But the guy has an approval rating below 30%….so, go ahead and feel free to support him, but understand that it’s not going to be particularly popular given how this entire term is going.
Always expect the worst from BYU players. Going to Wyoming games as a kid taught me real quick how both BYU players and fans are some of the biggest gaping assholes in college sports. They’d look down their noses at everything about us – how we dressed, how we cheered, that we put up with metal benches at War Memorial because we’re a broke ass red state that funnels all public money directly into the coal industry’s pockets (still waiting for a return on investment), and that either the Cougars didn’t beat us by enough or that our cheapskate university somehow scraped together the funds to bribe the refs.
And this isn’t a Mormons in general thing, my best friend back then was born in Laramie and his dad worked for UW, but because they were Mormon, his family HAD to cheer for BYU when they played Wyoming as doing otherwise would be seen as a slight against the LDS church itself. Oh, but it’s perfectly okay if you’re a Utah or Utah State fan.
Also, Brigham Young once either allowed or personally ordered the murder of US servicemen and tried to blame it on a local tribe in the hopes of tricking the US Army into purging them. So fuck him and everything named after him.
Correction: that would be re-using the “Jersey” joke. It’s YOUR job to re-use the (Nike) “jersey” joke.
Ultimately, don’t get nonsports opinions from jocks. Especially political opinions. These are guys that have spent all their time and talent on a ball game, the average NFL fan in more educated and informed then the average NFL player
I’ve said the same thing to friends and family that asked me about it. I basically stated the same thing as you. I would’ve more shocked if he “felt the Bern”.
You know, it’s easy to feel like the Seahawks get the least media attention in the whole league and part of that is a consequence of being geographically distant from everyone else. Seattle is practically out on the moon and nobody seems to be in any hurry to fly out here. On the other hand, it also means we don’t get the same kind of negative media coverage that everyone else gets.
Was it stupid? Oh absolutely. But it’s his opinion and choice so I don’t have anything against it. Primarily because I hope our president does well so the people can do well. I wouldn’t say that’s where we are, but that’s another subject. I would say that just because he supports Trump, that doesn’t mean he likes everything he does or agrees with it, I’m sure.
What I hate about this situation is that when politics come up, you’ve got people from every direction, arguing over who’s right and who’s wrong. Dart isn’t the enemy. People in forums aren’t the enemy….for me, the enemy is the Falcons, because I want to just focus on the game itself. People really shouldn’t care about an athlete’s political alignment or beliefs. If they are a good person, it’ll show.
Also, I thought the Giants had a pretty good overall offseason. Last year, they felt dead in the water before the season even started. Now it feels like they could be a tough out if nothing else.