You Can Just Tell Pat Shurmur Is Not Thrilled With Dave Gettleman and Daniel Jones

The best thing as a fan is when your team wins, but if you can’t have that a big part of the game is believing that you know better than the stubborn men in charge. Dave Gettleman, in picking Daniel Jones instead of the higher-upside Dwayne Haskins or a top-flight pass rusher, proved Giants fans right that he’s incapable of holding the job. But it’s not just the fans: In the press conference above, it is striking to examine the dour body language of Pat Shurmur.

In the video, Shurmur outwardly says all the right things about how there was a consensus in the organization behind Jones, how they got their guy, and how he could be the Big Blue starter for a very long time. But his poker face pretty overtly displays that he’s holding a hand of having fought for a different path and been overruled by his boss.

I get that the Draft is an absolutely grueling process and that by the end of the first day — after four months of rigorous evaluations, give-and-take discussion inside the building, and building a big board — one is exhausted. Nevertheless, if the Giants had really done what Shurmur wanted, he would’ve been up there exuberant about how much more room they’d have for activities.

Now, we don’t know exactly which path Shurmur would have preferred — if he’d have rather had a quarterback in Haskins that he could eventually open up the playbook with, or an immediate impact maker to menace the opposing quarterback. As an armchair psychologist, to me, it just looks like the gears are spinning inside his head that if Jones ever does pan out he’ll be long gone and it will be in service of his successor — and that it’s highly unlikely Shurmur would get a third opportunity as a head coach even if everyone with eyes can tell the franchise management around him was incompetent both times.

Is Eli Manning the answer? Of course not, and Shurmur knows that. But he also knows that Eli was returning and if that was going to be the circumstance he was presumably hoping for someone who could fill one of the many holes on the rest of the Giants’ roster right now, and if not that then a quarterback who could at least excite the fan base. Now he’ll likely be collateral damage.