The New York Giants head into an offseason in which 18 players will become unrestricted free agents. Several of them — quarterback Daniel Jones and running back Saquon Barkley — are widely considered key components.
General manager Joe Schoen agrees.
Despite a good chunk of salary cap space, Schoen intends to prioritize re-signing known commodities as opposed to high-profile free agents.
“There’s a risk to any big contract. Anybody can go out there and get hurt at any position. I think that’s risk-reward,” Schoen told reporters on Monday. “The good thing about, I feel, extending people in-house (is that) you know their work ethic. You know their durability. You know their injury history. You know how they train. You know how they practice. So, in terms of eliminating some of the margin for error, it’s a known commodity.
“We’ve got some guys that are good players that are currently UFAs. These are known commodities in-house that we know intimately from being with them for a year. And we’ll see who we want to bring back throughout these meetings and what their market value is going to be based on our analysis. Again, if we can bring some of our own back, we will, mixed with guys outside the building. We’ll look at that. Ideally to me, the known commodities that are good football players that you know, that’s going to be our priority first. And then we’ll look outside the building, if we need to, to supplement the roster.
Schoen noted that he’d like to have Jones, Barkley, safety Julian Love, wide receiver Sterling Shepard, and others back but recognized that there’s a business side to things.
“We’d like to have all the guys back, I really would. But there’s a business side to it. There are rules that you need to operate under in terms of the salary cap,” Schoen said. “Everybody is going to step back, take the emotion out of it, evaluate the roster and then we’ve got to operate under the salary cap. How are you going to divvy up? How are we going to create the roster?”
The cap can be manipulated a bit so many may scoff at those remarks, but Schoen is far more concerned with avoiding salary issues than his predecessor. And while the Giants do have more room in which to work than in previous seasons, they’re still not completely out of the woods.
