As good as Saquon Barkley and Daniel Jones have been on the field, Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll have been even better off it. The rookie general manager and coach of the Giants have made chicken salad out of chicken you-know-what, at least according to those who expected this team, already 6-2, to win just four or five games all season.
The metrics say the Giants will make the postseason for the first time since 2016. Despite Xavier McKinney’s off-roading hand injury and surgery — the biggest Cabo misadventure since Dallas quarterback Tony Romo vacationed there with Jessica Simpson before losing a playoff game to the Giants 15 years ago — the realistic pathway looks pretty clear. It goes like this:
Beat the Texans and Lions to get to 8-2. Then, split with Washington and pummel Jeff Saturday’s Colts to go 2-5 over a closing seven-game stretch that includes two meetings with the unbeaten Eagles and road games against Dallas and Minnesota.
Every team that won at least 10 games last year qualified for the expanded tournament, which also found room for two nine-win teams. Daboll said Tuesday that he hasn’t talked to his players about playoff possibilities because, “If you get too far ahead of yourself, it brings you back to reality real quick.”
The truth is, Schoen was the one who brought everyone back to reality by not making a trade at the deadline. When he had the chance to reward the Giants for their charmed start, Schoen took a pass. He looked at his roster, looked at how his team was winning games, looked at the price of acquiring a difference-maker at receiver or elsewhere, and then shook his head, “No.”
Schoen decided his players weren’t good enough to make a most improbable run at the Super Bowl, or to command a meaningful small-picture reinforcement at a big-picture expense. Maybe it was the right thing to do, and maybe it wasn’t.
Either way, as much as Schoen praised his team’s toughness and professionalism, his inaction spoke louder than his words.
Now the players have to prove him wrong. When underdog athletes reach the playoffs or win a championship against the odds, they love to cite the media when shouting, “Nobody believed in us.” In this case, if the Giants make a spirited playoff run, that “nobody” will include their employers.
Asked if he was disappointed that Schoen didn’t add talent at the deadline, Saquon Barkley told The Post: “I wouldn’t say we were disappointed. At the end of the day, it takes two sides to tango. I don’t want to speak for Joe, but I’m pretty sure Joe and those guys upstairs weren’t just sitting down at the trade deadline and not trying to make something happen. I feel like they probably tried to make a move and it didn’t work out.”
Schoen was indeed working the phones and communicating constantly with Daboll about the possibilities and the price tags attached to them. They traded away an oft-injured, underperforming talent, Kadarius Toney, from a receivers group that already was painfully thin. In telling comments, Schoen called the subtraction without an offsetting roster addition the “best decision for the organization for where we are, and probably just leave it at that.”
The GM also said the organization “had to “step back and honestly evaluate the roster, too. “You can get caught up in the, ‘Hey, we won the game.’ But we were also down 17-3 in the game at some point. You’ve got to step back and look at it for what it is.”
So Schoen didn’t make the kind of acquisitions made by other NFC playoff probables, such as the Eagles (Robert Quinn), 49ers (Christian McCaffrey) and Vikings (T.J. Hockenson), or by his former employers in Buffalo (Nyheim Hines) and Miami (Bradley Chubb, Jeff Wilson Jr.), or by another NFC team, Chicago, trying to get a developing quarterback some help (Chase Claypool).
Jones sure could’ve used an outside playmaker to help the Giants make that fair evaluation of him. On the subject of a quiet deadline, Jones said: “We don’t know what all goes on in those situations, and all that’s out of our control. So we’ve just got to focus on playing well, and [we have] a lot of trust and confidence in the guys we got in this locker room.”
How good can these 2022 Giants ultimately be? Asked if he believes his team has enough talent to make the playoffs, Jones told The Post: “I do, yeah. I think we’re confident in that. At the same time, I think our focus is still week to week … and improving week to week, and that’s the only way we’d be in that position. But I think we are confident in our ability to do that and be that kind of team.”
If the Giants do end up as that kind of team in the playoffs, they will have proven wrong a lot of people in the press box … and in their own front office.