Gilbride Rumored to be Fired

Late Monday we tweeted that sources inside the Giants confirm that sometime later this week or next week Kevin Gilbride will be let go from the team.

We made the case for many years that the Giants won despite Gilbride. We made the case that when he was dealt less than a perfect hand that the team suffered without the necessary adjustments.  And this past week we summarized those conclusions in a blogpost that referenced 14 reasons for parting ways with the Giants Offensive Coordinator.

Two of the 14 points made last week were that Gilbride (1) has not played to the strengths of his roster and (2) has not fostered the development of his young WRs.  It was perhaps telling on Monday that John Mara spoke about the last two weeks of the season with the sudden surfacing of Jerrel Jernigan.  “I’m not sure why it took us three years to find out that Jerrel Jernigan could play.”  If Cruz wasn’t hurt, would we have ever seen Jernigan lined up in the slot, where he needed to be?  The point we had made over the course of the last few seasons was that Jernigan was being punished along with every other young WR for making mistakes in his route trees.  The coordinator’s system was more important than the strengths of the personnel.

Mara showed frustration with an offense that is broken.  We are relieved to see that the Giants owner was not fooled by the puffery of 7 wins that covered up a multitude of problems. In tomorrow’s post we will show a little more evidence of how those 7 wins were inflated.  Suffice it to say that as loyal as Giants ownership/management is to its coaches and players, that thankfully it is not blind either to the failings of 2013 or prior years.  It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds, but it certainly looks like Mara sees things the way we do, and that Gilbride’s tenure at the NY Giants is under scrutiny.

Where is Reese in all of this?  Is it just us?  Does his biased spin taint his role in the administration?  We all have bosses.  As insulated as ownership is, they were livid at halftime of the “pathetic” Seattle game.  I sort of get the feeling that Reese was/is defending his coaching staff more than Mara.  Mara took the gloves off.  Reese did not.  I appreciate the need to be positive, but an effective manager must CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACTS a la Jim Collins.  I would hope that Reese is confronting the brutal facts behind closed doors, at the very least.  He should start with all of his errors on the offensive line, which are numerous.  Defenders of Reese will point to moves such as bringing in Jon Beason, Josh Brown and Ryan Mundy.  I thought the move to use the temporary IR slot on Andre Brown was very important.  So obviously it is not as if we want to portray Reese as woefully incompetent.  We just feel that he has been more interested in noting how the glass is half full than admitting that he is draining the glass, ie failure over a 4 year period to rebuild an aging OL.  This OL deficiency led to the tide rolling out to sea on Gilbride. The OC was now swimming naked amidst an inability to make adjustments in his offense.  Lastly, it was a minor miracle that Eli Manning did not get injured any sooner, as we were aghast at the seeming disregard for the health of the beleaguered QB.  Sure, Manning dug his own hole deeper with his own mistakes, but this is precisely where the coaching staff was needed to tell him to stop digging, through a simpler and more vanilla offense to suit the roster.