The Limits of Control

The New York Giants aren’t even good at this, but being good at it is secondary to proving a point. In a league filled with franchises that run like Republican White Houses, where the projection of power is at least as important as actually getting anything done, they are among the most counterproductively obsessed with keeping order. There are no guff-takers on any NFL sideline, or in the skyboxes above the field, accidentally dredging their shirt cuffs in ranch dressing as their charges sledgehammer away at each other’s brains, but authoritarianism is a rainbow and management styles vary. Jerry Richardson, when he wasn’t leering at the women he employed, made everyone call him Mister, like a plantation owner. Rex Ryan was more like a fun uncle with a short fuse. You tread carefully around football men, all of them, but you’ve got more leeway with some than others.

John Mara owns the Giants because his dad owned the Giants, no other reason, and Tom Coughlin is a blaring firetruck of a man who, when he coached the Giants, insisted all his players show up to team meetings ten minutes early, to teach them the value of having to set your watch ten minutes fast because your boss is as an asshole. Mara loved Coughlin. He was so angry all the time, he must have been working hard. The Giants won two Super Bowls with Coughlin delegating playcalling duties so he could spend entire games blowing out referees eardrums. The blankly gawping face of those squads was Eli Manning. He was never anything more than like the sixth-best player on the roster, and it’s unclear whether Coughlin was a good coach or an irrelevant one, but they helped to reinforce Mara’s ideas about the relationship between a strictly caucasian definition of decorum and success. Meanwhile Plaxico Burress, who shot himself in the thigh while hitching up his sweatpants, and Jason Pierre-Paul, who mangled his hand in a firework accident, were doing most of the heavy lifting. They’re a little less glorified than Eli and the Time Lord, in the franchise-approved retelling of those championship runs.

The Giants won their most recent Super Bowl in 2011, and they have sucked ever since. One playoff trip in the last seven seasons. You might think with that record, everyone from the Coughlin era would be gone by now, but Manning is still around and though the talent and coaching staff around him are different, he is in certain respects still playing for the same regime. Last winter, Mara fired Jerry Reese, who built those title-winning teams before completely losing his touch, and replaced him with a guy who worked for the Giants from 1998 until 2012, when he left to take over the Panthers’ front office, where everybody seemed to actively hate him by the time he lost that job. Mara’s always a good bet to choose familiarity over competence.

Dave Gettleman is a boisterous charlatan, a monologist with little to say. It makes sense the Giants would like him. He’s very commanding and completely full of shit. His understanding of the sport is stuck in 2002. He dismisses analytics out of hand as useless nerdery, talks incessantly about the ground game in a league that’s pass-happier than ever. He claims to eat tape for hours and hours yet with curious regularity arrives at the conclusion that the Giants should sign players he’s already familiar with. (These players often aren’t any good.) He’s as confident as he is out of touch, and so obviously in over his head, but he doesn’t waver. He’s Don Rumsfeld appearing to genuinely enjoy the dog days of the Iraq War simply because it gives him something to argue and act superior about. No, see, the thing that you guys won’t ever understand is…

Of course he has no secret knowledge. Everything is as dicked as it looks, but clocking double duty as the devil and his advocate is how Gettleman gets his kicks. He delights in proving a point. Even if it’s a loser. Maybe especially if it’s a loser.

Odell Beckham is the best player the Giants have had since Michael Strahan was in his prime, so naturally Gettleman dealt him to the Cleveland Browns for a mid-first rounder, the second-best of the Browns’ two third round picks, and Jabrill Peppers. He might spin this as asset management, but it’s a pretty lousy haul for a 26-year-old who’s also one of the best receivers in the league. He might spin it as a cap-easing measure, but it saves the Giants a mere $5 million this season. (For comparison’s sake, Gettleman could cut Manning tomorrow and save $17 million.) Beckham is temperamental in the same way every third great wide receiver is temperamental. He parties hard, throws the odd tantrum, and this past season said some true if mildly inflammatory stuff about not being utilized correctly in the Giants offense. He’s been shipped out for being kind of a jerk and leaves in his wake a roster that now has about as many good players as you can count on one hand.

This is stupid and petty and self-thwarting, but it does send a clear message about where Gettleman and the Giants’ priorities lie. They value the most superficial respectability and obedience above all else. You can say what you like about Eli Manning — for example, he was washed up three years ago and watching him play is like suffering from steadily intensifying tinnitus — but he’ll look a reporter in the eye after a zero-touchdown day and give him an empty quote. He wouldn’t dream of trashing management. Perhaps in part because they’ve been propping him up as, again, he’s been more like a grating high-pitched hum than a professional athlete over the past few seasons, but still. He would scam fans out of thousands of dollars by selling fake memorabilia, but that’s white-collar crime, which is basically no crime at all. At age 38, terminally dull and capable of making some of the throws some of the time, he remains the Giants’ head boy. Beckham couldn’t compete with that. He was much better than Eli, sure, but a little too—let’s just say difficult, and never interrogate what we mean by that.

Trading away one of the only exciting players you’ve got to stand on the principle that nobody is bigger than your shitty, shitty football team is bold, and in the end, this is all that matters. In the NFL, if you’ve got the right person’s ear, and you swear to god you haven’t enjoyed a pop song since “Thriller” came out, you have license to do so much more damage to a franchise than an All-Pro with an attitude problem ever could. You’re as uninformed and impulsive and egotistical as anybody, but you’ve got the proper aesthetic, so you’re golden. You’re afforded respect that you don’t have to repay to other people. They have to suffer you, and you can send them packing if they don’t smile while they’re doing it.