Bill Kostroun/New York Post
Bill Kostroun/NY Post
Back in 2018, Ben McAdoo was in his first season as the head coach of the New York Giants. At 38, he was the second-youngest head coach in the league at the time. He was fond of his own unique sayings, and some of them were quite fun and appropriate. One of his go-to lines was this: “Farm your own land.”
The message was about dealing with what you can deal with and not what is beyond your horizon. The phrase also could relate to how a team needs to approach a season: Concern yourself first with those closest to you — the teams in your own division.
The Giants went 4-2 in the NFC East in McAdoo’s debut season, 11-5 overall, and made the playoffs. The farming was productive. Everything soured around him the next year, and he did not even make it out of the 2017 season, starting a spiral of change and unrest that has carried the Giants through four head coaches in a six-year period.
One of the main reasons the Giants are where they are — down with dregs of the league — is that they have been unable to “farm their own land.’’ They have mostly stunk inside their own division. Pat Shurmur, in his two seasons, was 1-5 and 2-4 when confronting the NFC East landscape of the Cowboys, Eagles and Washington franchise. Joe Judge showed promise in 2020, going 4-2 within the division, but faltered to 1-5 in 2021. Brian Daboll won nine games and made the playoffs as a first-year head coach in 2022, but the Giants were just 1-4-1 in the division. They were 3-3 in 2023 and bottomed out in 2024, going 0-6 in the NFC East for their first winless season in the division ever.