The ultimate job of the offensive coordinator is to score points. It is often a thankless job. If you don’t score enough points, with your team and with your fan base, they will try to run you out of town.
Paul Hackett became a pariah for Jets fans. Brian Schottenheimer was under siege. Kevin Gilbride retired as Tom Coughlin’s OC before he was fired.
Now it’s Jason Garrett’s turn.
“I think the biggest thing we try to do is just focus on what we can do to help our team get better every day,” Garrett said. “Those are things we talk about with our players all the time. We have to live that as coaches.”
And the living under the microscope is no Big Easy.
Garrett was on the hot seat in his last couple of years as head coach of the Cowboys, and he is on the hot seat now.
It would behoove him to show up in New Orleans as Saint Jason.
Who knows if 0-4 might force Joe Judge’s hand?
“I think everyone understands the urgency and the importance of prorating and playing well,” Daniel Jones said Thursday.
The questions about making a radical change involving Garrett have been flying at Judge during a week when the mother of all offensive game plans is required with Sean Payton, revered head coach of the Saints, scheming mayhem on the other sideline Sunday in their raucous hurricane-delayed home opener.
“I have a ton of confidence in Coach Garrett, I know the offense does,” Jones said. “It’s on us to execute those plays. Some of the breakdowns, those are execution issues, things I gotta do better, things we all have to do better on the field.”
It is rare that you will find a player who doesn’t publicly support his coach. Keep in mind that the 2019 Giants defended Pat Shurmur at the end. But at least Garrett has that in his favor.
“I do support all the coaches, I definitely support coach Garrett,” Saquon Barkley said. “At the end of the day, we gotta go out there and execute too. It’s easy to point the finger at just the coaches.”
Across his 19 games as Giants offensive coordinator, the Giants have scored 336 points. That’s 17.7 ppg. You win with 17.7 ppg if you have the ’85 Bears defense. Only seven teams have scored fewer than the 56 points the 2021 Giants have scored. The 2020 Giants fielded the 31st-ranked offense.
The likes of Kurt Warner and Dan Orlovsky have come down hard on Garrett’s scheme. “Archaic” was the word Orlovsky used for it recently. No one has confused Garrett’s creativity for Payton’s or Sean McVay’s or Kyle Shanahan’s, among others.
Garrett was asked if he feels the pressure to make it work.
“Absolutely, it’s a responsibility,” Garrett said. “It’s one that we all embrace. Whatever our role is, you want to embrace those roles.”
Garrett had been dealt a raw deal in this regard: general manager Dave Gettleman hasn’t fixed the offensive line and captain Nick Gates is lost for the season. There have been four starters at left guard. Barkley is three games into his return from major knee surgery. Evan Engram missed the first two games and probably wished he missed the third. Kenny Golladay had a hamstring issue in training camp. Kadarius Toney was slow to recover from COVID and had a hamstring injury. Sterling Shepard and Darius Slayton missed the second half against the Falcons and are long shots against the Saints.
And no one wants to hear any excuses.
Other teams not named the Jets have managed to overcome the loss or losses of key players.
As Bill Parcells used to say:
“Don’t tell me about the pain, show me the baby.”
“There have been some positive things over the first three games that we continue to build on, but there’s certainly plenty we have to clean up,” Garrett said. “We try to work hard as coaches to put the best plan together, we try to do a good job implementing it, we ask our players to practice it and carry it to the game.”
The players either have not carried it to the game or Garrett is not putting them in enough positions to succeed. When you’re 0-3, and you score 14 points at home against the Atlanta Falcons, it’s both.
“Obviously we need to score more points,” Garrett said.
The Giants are 18th in total yards.
“The passing game, I think we had six or seven explosives the other day, we have to continue to do that,” Garrett said, “that’s what gives you a chance to score points.”
The 2002 Giants were 3-4 and had scored the second-fewest points in the NFL when then-head coach Jim Fassel stripped Payton of his play-calling duties and took on the responsibility himself. The Giants would score 24 points or more in seven of their last 10 games. The finale turned out to be a disgraceful 39-38 wild-card playoff collapse against the 49ers.
“I wasn’t happy with the direction we were going,” Fassel said at the time. “We had way too many formations. We’d shift and move and motion and they’d sit there and look at us.”
All eyes on Jason Garrett now:
The red zone has been a dead zone.
“We’re doing a great job of moving the ball down the field, a great job of getting down the field,” Barkley said. “We’re just not finishing.”
The tight end is an afterthought. Anyone seen Kyle Rudolph in the red zone?
Golladay should be more of a downfield threat, of course.
The conservative play-calling following the James Bradberry interception late against Washington marred what had been an aggressive plan.
Change for the sake of change can be deleterious. On the other hand, desperate times call for desperate measures. Judge must weigh the effect it could have on Jones. On the other hand, is Jones progressing the way the Giants want and need him to on Garrett’s watch?
Giants fans want their pound of flesh. A scapegoat. I’m not in favor of firing a good football man and a better man. But sometimes a quarterback and an offense need to hear a different voice. Freddie Kitchens would be Next Voice Up. Sometimes a flagging offense demands a shake-up.
Garrett might need a big game on Sunday to keep calling the plays.
“I don’t really think about that,” he said. “We just gotta get better. We come in and we work hard and try to do that as coaches and as players every day. Had a good day yesterday, gotta come back and have a good day today.”
Have a good day on Sunday. Poise in the Superdome noise. And points. Which is the whole point of the play-caller’s job.