The decision to let Joe Schoen run the next coaching search was so frustrating to me that I found myself researching recent comparables around the league just to see what Giants ownership could possibly be thinking. With that said, here's a list of all the current GM/HC pairings distributed into categories that seemed relevant:

GM/HC Same Year Hires

A full 40% of the league is running under this system, and for good reason. It increases the likelihood of shared vision between GM & HC, reduces opportunities for either party to make excuses or pull job preserving maneuvers, and avoids all the headaches of getting a new HC to run in stride with an existing (and often flawed) front office vision.

Five of these pairings are comfortably successful, one is dead on the vine and the rest are to be determined. I think it's fair to say there's a 50/50 chance of getting a year 1 HC/GM pairing right, but those odds seem better than some of the scenarios further down.

Established Front Office

This is the category all franchises strive to be in. It represents stability either at the front office level, in the HC role, or both. The Ravens, Chiefs and Steelers all hired their current, franchise-level HCs under different front office leadership but promoted from within to maintain continuity.

We all talk about the Packers' transition from Favre to Rodgers to Love as being so seamless, but their preservation of stability at the GM HC level may be even more impressive. Gutekunst was an internal hire and he somehow managed to bridge the HC gap from old guard to new with an egomaniac QB looking to control the narrative at every opportunity.

The Seahawks and Saints are in the precarious situation the Giants found themselves in a decade ago - transitioning out of a franchise-level HC and seeing if they can find a new rhythm. The Seahawks look to be in good shape; the Saints are in trouble.

Fuck the Eagles, but Roseman is a very good GM.

GMs That Survived Year 1 Coach Pairing

This is a highly erratic category that our sad franchise is about to join.

The Houston Texans embraced the tank and burned through two coaches in two years before finding a stabilizing force in DeMeco Ryans. It'd be cool to see more franchises employ this strategy, but it requires paying multiple coaches at once.

Two teams let their GM hire a second coach after three seasons with their HC pair: the Falcons and Bears. You could criticize both decisions at the time, but both GMs leveraged young QBs effectively to buy themselves runway. Fontenot looks cooked in Atlanta, while I'll need to see more from the Bears to suggest Ben Johnson isn't benefiting from every coin flip game falling his way.

Joe Scheon gets his chance to start again after getting effectively four years with his first HC. I'll share my conclusions at the end.

Our dream scenario would be the Rams, where GM Les Snead hit the lottery with Sean McVay after 5 years of the Jeff Fisher experience. The Rams could even have fit into the 'Established Front Office' category but the parallels to the Giants were strong enough to include here.

GM Survivors

All these GMs got to go through multiple HCs at different rates, to very different results.

The recently fired GM of the Dolphins Chris Greer somehow got to oversee three HC tenures at three years each (2+ for McDaniel). From the outside, this seems like a quintessential example of maximizing work politics at the expense of culture building.

Both Denver's George Paton and Indianapolis' Chris Ballard got to hire their first coach in year two, which was initially its own category until those GMs got sorted into other buckets. Denver was an Established Front Office on the decline that made its Hackett mistake fast and may have steadied itself with the Sean Payton hire.

Ballard in Indianapolis got a good five year stretch out of Frank Reich that petered out, but demonstrated enough success to get another chance with Shane Steichen (plus Jim Irsay was an unconventional owner to say the least).

Down in Tampa, Jason Licht has a resume that matches the Florida Man persona of the franchise. Four coaches in eleven years, including a three year run where a franchise-tier HC and the greatest-QB-not-named-Eli-Manning spontaneously decided "Why not move south for a couple of years and win a championship?"

Other

The Patriots, Cowboys and Bengals are all too unique to draw any real parallels to the Giants situation. The Pats are transitioning away from an icon and pounced on an unexpected opportunity in Vrabel. The Bengals run their team like a family-owned mattress store and the Cowboys are trapped in Jerry's fever dream.

So Where Do The Giants Land?

Looking at the comparables doesn't fill me with much optimism.

We haven't had an Established Front Office for 10+ years and it's going to take another 10 years of sustained success to even hope of getting there.

Hitting on a year 1 GM/HC pairing is a coin flip in a vacuum, but the Giants have a QB candidate in Dart that could tip the odds heavily.

If we put all the GMs that got to make multiple coaching hires into one category and evaluate accordingly, there's an even lower success rate. Two of those potential successes (Texans and Broncos) burned through hires quickly to find their guy, while Miami and Atlanta are busts.

Chicago has been doing the asynchronous hire routine for years now and it hasn't worked yet.

Could the Giants follow a Tampa model but with a coach instead of a QB? There are so many reasons why I think a Belichick hire would fail in practice, but beyond those reasons I want to see this franchise establish itself as a stable force again and hiring a 75 year old coach that's used to being a GM isn't the path to getting there.

That leaves the Colts and Rams as the remaining models to emulate. But here's the thing: both Snead and Ballard's teams weren't complete and utter dogshit in the years leading up to their second HC hires.

Ballard/Reich regime: 5 years, .547 win %, two playoff appearances

Snead/Fisher regime: 5 years, .414 win %, no playoffs (weak, but Fisher's resume kept him around longer)

Schoen/Daboll regime: 4 years, .336 win %, one playoff appearance

Nothing in that resume justifies another shot. In addition, the Schoen/Daboll pairing was sold as a team while the other two were not. In fact, Schoen/Daboll might be the most synonymous pairing of any duo on this list (Beane and Mcdermott in Buffalo outgrew that narrative with their success).

The only reasons I can think this is happening is A) Schoen was playing office politics this whole time instead of committing 100% to the effort and B) John Mara wants stability while he deals with his health issues. For B, I wish Mara the best but at 70 years old maybe it's time to delegate some of the responsibility anyway and play the role of advisor more.

For A), any coach worth their salt - established winner or hot shot coordinator - will either see the office jockeying for what it is and stay away, or think they have the talent/smarts to outmaneuver Schoen and take the reins.

Being a head coach necessitates a person that is supremely confident in their abilities and philosophy. Even if there's moderate success on the field, I just don't see a scenario where that type of person comes in and makes nice with Schoen for 10 or even 5 years. Anything short of unmitigated success will lead to a power struggle and the franchise will be five years further away from an Established Front Office.

TL;DR: We're likely screwed, but our best hope is to follow the Rams trajectory with Snead/McVay. Second place goes to the Colts and Ballard/Steichen. There's not much comparison around the league after that.

The decision to let Joe Schoen run the next coaching search was so frustrating to me that I found myself researching recent comparables around the league just to see what Giants ownership could possibly be thinking. With that said, here's a list of all the current GM/HC pairings distributed into categories that seemed relevant:

GM/HC Same Year Hires

A full 40% of the league is running under this system, and for good reason. It increases the likelihood of shared vision between GM & HC, reduces opportunities for either party to make excuses or pull job preserving maneuvers, and avoids all the headaches of getting a new HC to run in stride with an existing (and often flawed) front office vision.

Five of these pairings are comfortably successful, one is dead on the vine and the rest are to be determined. I think it's fair to say there's a 50/50 chance of getting a year 1 HC/GM pairing right, but those odds seem better than some of the scenarios further down.

Established Front Office

This is the category all franchises strive to be in. It represents stability either at the front office level, in the HC role, or both. The Ravens, Chiefs and Steelers all hired their current, franchise-level HCs under different front office leadership but promoted from within to maintain continuity.

We all talk about the Packers' transition from Favre to Rodgers to Love as being so seamless, but their preservation of stability at the GM HC level may be even more impressive. Gutekunst was an internal hire and he somehow managed to bridge the HC gap from old guard to new with an egomaniac QB looking to control the narrative at every opportunity.

The Seahawks and Saints are in the precarious situation the Giants found themselves in a decade ago - transitioning out of a franchise-level HC and seeing if they can find a new rhythm. The Seahawks look to be in good shape; the Saints are in trouble.

Fuck the Eagles, but Roseman is a very good GM.

GMs That Survived Year 1 Coach Pairing

This is a highly erratic category that our sad franchise is about to join.

The Houston Texans embraced the tank and burned through two coaches in two years before finding a stabilizing force in DeMeco Ryans. It'd be cool to see more franchises employ this strategy, but it requires paying multiple coaches at once.

Two teams let their GM hire a second coach after three seasons with their HC pair: the Falcons and Bears. You could criticize both decisions at the time, but both GMs leveraged young QBs effectively to buy themselves runway. Fontenot looks cooked in Atlanta, while I'll need to see more from the Bears to suggest Ben Johnson isn't benefiting from every coin flip game falling his way.

Joe Scheon gets his chance to start again after getting effectively four years with his first HC. I'll share my conclusions at the end.

Our dream scenario would be the Rams, where GM Les Snead hit the lottery with Sean McVay after 5 years of the Jeff Fisher experience. The Rams could even have fit into the 'Established Front Office' category but the parallels to the Giants were strong enough to include here.

GM Survivors

All these GMs got to go through multiple HCs at different rates, to very different results.

The recently fired GM of the Dolphins Chris Greer somehow got to oversee three HC tenures at three years each (2+ for McDaniel). From the outside, this seems like a quintessential example of maximizing work politics at the expense of culture building.

Both Denver's George Paton and Indianapolis' Chris Ballard got to hire their first coach in year two, which was initially its own category until those GMs got sorted into other buckets. Denver was an Established Front Office on the decline that made its Hackett mistake fast and may have steadied itself with the Sean Payton hire.

Ballard in Indianapolis got a good five year stretch out of Frank Reich that petered out, but demonstrated enough success to get another chance with Shane Steichen (plus Jim Irsay was an unconventional owner to say the least).

Down in Tampa, Jason Licht has a resume that matches the Florida Man persona of the franchise. Four coaches in eleven years, including a three year run where a franchise-tier HC and the greatest-QB-not-named-Eli-Manning spontaneously decided "Why not move south for a couple of years and win a championship?"

Other

The Patriots, Cowboys and Bengals are all too unique to draw any real parallels to the Giants situation. The Pats are transitioning away from an icon and pounced on an unexpected opportunity in Vrabel. The Bengals run their team like a family-owned mattress store and the Cowboys are trapped in Jerry's fever dream.

So Where Do The Giants Land?

Looking at the comparables doesn't fill me with much optimism.

We haven't had an Established Front Office for 10+ years and it's going to take another 10 years of sustained success to even hope of getting there.

Hitting on a year 1 GM/HC pairing is a coin flip in a vacuum, but the Giants have a QB candidate in Dart that could tip the odds heavily.

If we put all the GMs that got to make multiple coaching hires into one category and evaluate accordingly, there's an even lower success rate. Two of those potential successes (Texans and Broncos) burned through hires quickly to find their guy, while Miami and Atlanta are busts.

Chicago has been doing the asynchronous hire routine for years now and it hasn't worked yet.

Could the Giants follow a Tampa model but with a coach instead of a QB? There are so many reasons why I think a Belichick hire would fail in practice, but beyond those reasons I want to see this franchise establish itself as a stable force again and hiring a 75 year old coach that's used to being a GM isn't the path to getting there.

That leaves the Colts and Rams as the remaining models to emulate. But here's the thing: both Snead and Ballard's teams weren't complete and utter dogshit in the years leading up to their second HC hires.

Ballard/Reich regime: 5 years, .547 win %, two playoff appearances

Snead/Fisher regime: 5 years, .414 win %, no playoffs (weak, but Fisher's resume kept him around longer)

Schoen/Daboll regime: 4 years, .336 win %, one playoff appearance

Nothing in that resume justifies another shot. In addition, the Schoen/Daboll pairing was sold as a team while the other two were not. In fact, Schoen/Daboll might be the most synonymous pairing of any duo on this list (Beane and Mcdermott in Buffalo outgrew that narrative with their success).

The only reasons I can think this is happening is A) Schoen was playing office politics this whole time instead of committing 100% to the effort and B) John Mara wants stability while he deals with his health issues. For B, I wish Mara the best but at 70 years old maybe it's time to delegate some of the responsibility anyway and play the role of advisor more.

For A), any coach worth their salt - established winner or hot shot coordinator - will either see the office jockeying for what it is and stay away, or think they have the talent/smarts to outmaneuver Schoen and take the reins.

Being a head coach necessitates a person that is supremely confident in their abilities and philosophy. Even if there's moderate success on the field, I just don't see a scenario where that type of person comes in and makes nice with Schoen for 10 or even 5 years. Anything short of unmitigated success will lead to a power struggle and the franchise will be five years further away from an Established Front Office.

TL;DR: We're likely screwed, but our best hope is to follow the Rams trajectory with Snead/McVay. Second place goes to the Colts and Ballard/Steichen. There's not much comparison around the league after that.