Giants keeping GM Joe Schoen for 2026 season
Giants general manager Joe Schoen speaks during a news conference on Dec. 2, 2025 in East Rutherford, N.J. Credit: AP/Kena Betancur
Four years ago, a new general manager was hired to fix the Giants. It didn’t quite work out.
The team has gone 23-46-1 since, including the just-concluded worst two-year stretch in franchise history in which they won only seven of 34 games. Three of those seven wins came in late December or early January games that negatively impacted the Giants’ draft position.
So many of the picks in those drafts he oversaw have been disappointments, if not outright flops, and the Giants parted ways with many of the young stars they had on the roster that had been inherited.
By nearly every metric, the Giants are worse than they were in 2022 when that hire was made.
So on Monday, the Giants announced whom they will lean on to lead them from their status as one of the league’s perennial basement dwellers.
Yep. It’s the same guy.
Joe Schoen will be keeping his job.
It’s not a surprise to those who know the tendencies of an organization that often shows patience in such matters to a fault. It maintains the stance ownership took when it fired Brian Daboll in November and tapped Schoen to lead the search for his replacement as head coach.
But this reconfirmation also comes to the dismay of the many who see Schoen as part of the problems that have allowed the Giants to plumb new depths of despair.
“The 2025 season has been deeply disappointing, and the results on the field have not lived up to the standard this organization and our fans expect,” a statement from John Mara and Steve Tisch read. But it added: “Continuity and stability in the front office is important to our progress.”
Keeping Schoen certainly is not the easy thing for the Giants to do. Firing him would have been. It would have satisfied the bloodlust of a restless fan base. No one would have looked at Schoen’s record and thought the Giants were making the wrong move if they had decided to go in an entirely new direction.
Even Schoen seemed to understand that dynamic.
“Early on I made mistakes,” he said of his tenure on Monday. “I am fortunate to have great ownership here where you are allowed to stub your toe and try to course-correct.”
Schoen said he was “honored and humbled” to keep his job and “see this process through.”
“I am fortunate enough to be tasked with getting the organization and the franchise back to where it belongs,” he said. “That’s the goal as we move forward.”
So the Giants appear to want that new direction, but from the same director. They again are depending on Schoen to clean up a mess, but this time it’s one of his own making.
That’s a dangerous ask, especially with what is at stake in the coming weeks. The team will hire its seventh head coach (including the pair of interims it has been forced to employ) since Tom Coughlin left the building just a little more than a decade ago. They also are risking the future of Jaxson Dart, the lottery ticket they hold as a young quarterback who just completed his rookie season and who will be the centerpiece of whatever the Giants become in the next few years, good or bad.
But it’s not the Joe Schoen they hired in 2022 whom they are counting on to do all of this. It’s the one they hope has learned from everything that has happened since.
They could have gotten a new car, yes, but with Schoen, the Giants know all of the miles and dents, and they are comfortable with them.
“I don’t think we are starting from square one,” Schoen said. “Looking at where we are going, where the build is, what the plan is moving forward, and seeing the vision through, is why I think [I am still here].”
Having Dart is the biggest positive for the Giants. It’s a selling point for prospective head coaches and it probably saved Schoen’s job.
There are other solid pieces, too. Malik Nabers will be back at some point from his knee injury. So will running back Cam Skattebo from his season-ending ankle fracture. The team has stabilized its offensive line. It has a strong defensive front that includes Brian Burns — perhaps the top non-draft acquisition of Schoen’s career — along with Abdul Carter and Dexter Lawrence.
“We believe in our young core of talent, which we can build around for future success,” the Monday statement from ownership said.
The only thing missing now, from the way Schoen tells it, is the head coach. It’s up to him to find that.
“We’re going to get the right person to lead the franchise and get us back to what the standard is, and that’s competing for championships on a yearly basis,” Schoen said.
If he can do that, his legacy and security with the Giants will change dramatically. The Giants will change dramatically.
If he can’t, at some point soon, the Giants will have to go back to searching for someone who can. And next time, unlike the decision they made at these current crossroads, that will have to be someone else.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
