Ben McAdoo thinks the Giants will win NFC East
When last we saw Ben McAdoo, he and his hair gel were getting the heave-ho out of the Giants organization with four games remaining in the 2017 season. McAdoo skippered a wreck of a year for New York, a 3-13 debacle that saw Eli Manning’s astonishing games-started streak end for absolutely no good reason at all.
McAdoo’s exit
Speaking to the New York Post, McAdoo tried to spin matters in an optimistic direction, saying that new head coach Pat Shurmur and the Giants regime were headed in the direction he’d wanted to go all along: “I think they’ve made a lot of the moves I wanted to make.” He didn’t go into significant detail about what went wrong during the 2017 season, though it’s worth noting that he’s still getting paid for 2018 by the Giants and will be taking a year off from coaching as a result.
McAdoo sizes up the rest of the NFC East
In that go-along-to-get-along spirit, McAdoo thinks the Giants will win the NFC East this season. Why? He broke down the other challengers as follows:
“I think Philly, how much success has Philly had?” McAdoo told the Post. “I think they’re gonna have a hard time handling success. Dallas, I like their offensive line, but how long have we been saying that? Their defense, they got a bunch of young guys playing DB, Sean Lee is banged up a lot, and their D-line, they got a bunch of guys getting in trouble all the time. And Washington is Washington, right?”
It’s … well, it’s not the most trenchant of analysis, but it should give Giants fans a touch of some badly needed hope.
What about Eli?
McAdoo didn’t comment on Manning and the strange twists that accompanied the quarterback’s 2017 season, but indicated he wouldn’t have gone with a quarterback to replace Eli with the second pick of the 2018 draft, either.
“With the guys that came out this year, I’m not surprised they went the route they went by not drafting a guy,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stood on the table to draft any quarterback No. 2 either.” Instead, he called running back Saquon Barkley a “solid pick.”
The McAdoo Era in New York was a brief, strange one, but we’ll have to wait to see if it was an aberration, or just more of the same for the Giants.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
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