The New York Giants made a mistake in 2023. Coming off a surprisingly successful season in 2022, the first year of the Joe Schoen/Brian Daboll regime, the team decided to keep the offensive infrastructure in place. But for that to happen, they gave a huge extension to quarterback Daniel Jones and franchise tagged running back Saquon Barkley.

The 2023 season was a mess, Saquon walked in free agency, and the Giants are now having to handle a bad deal with Jones — who might realistically get benched over the next few weeks in favor of Drew Lock.

Now that Saquon has signed with the Philadelphia Eagles and has been one of the most productive offensive players in football, it's easy to pound on the Giants' decision to let him leave. But the choice was not absurd, and what has happened with Barkley on another team shouldn't affect that perception.

There's good and bad with the Giants' process here, and it's important to keep all that in mind to Project what the franchise should do moving forward.

The good

Let's start with the good, because these aspects are less obvious. Joe Schoen is a somewhat modern general manager, and he understands the concept of positional value well. That's why he allowed great players from non-valuable positions to walk.

Arguably, two of the Giants' three best players signed elsewhere, with Saquon Barkley going to the Philadelphia Eagles and safety Xavier McKinney signing with the Green Bay Packers. Both are having excellent seasons, and their new teams are extremely happy with the Giants' decision.

But the Giants don't have to think about what the other teams think. The Eagles and Packers are in completely different circumstances, and signing those players made sense to them — which doesn't mean it would for the Giants to the same degree.

Last year, with Saquon and McKinney on the team, the Giants were 30th in offense and 22nd on defense by EPA/play. This season, without them, both the offense and the defense are 23rd. So it's a relevant (even though insufficient) improvement by the offense, and a marginal regression for the defense.

To replace these lost pieces, the Giants went on the draft and selected safety Tyler Nubin in the second round and running back Tyrone Tracy in the fifth. The results by both of them have been excellent from the get go. Sure, they are not as good as Barkley and McKinney right now, but considering cost and age, it was a fine process considering the Giants' roster-building timeline.

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The bad

Regarding Saquon in particular, the Giants got pretty unlucky that he ended up with the Eagles, which maximized the narrative around the impact of the decision.

But there are also real, impactful decision-making flaws in the process. The big mistakes were made in 2023, when the Giants decided to tag Saquon and give Jones a four-year, $160 million extension. Had they executed the opposite, giving Saquon an extension and Jones a tag, the outcome would have been much sounder.

Saquon would be under contract for at least three years, maybe four, and the running back market is so low at this point that it makes sense to get great players — Barkley is making the same yearly average as wide receiver Gabe Davis with the Jacksonville Jaguars. And with Jones, after an outlier positive season (that wasn't even that good), a tag would have allowed the Giants to have a bigger sample size of production for the quarterback under Daboll's system, and the negotiation in the 2024 offseason would have been a lot different.

At the same time, the Giants could have extended McKinney one year before his free agency. The safety market is cheap as well, so $10 million, $12 million at most per year would be enough to keep him around.

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Another flaw that hinders the future

Since the 2023 offseason was gone and had been a complete failure, the Giants could have still been more sound in 2024, even allowing Barkley and McKinney to walk.

The Giants lost both, plus A'Shawn Robinson, Tyrod Taylor, and Ben Bredeson in free agency, but they are only receiving a compensatory fourth-round pick for losing McKinney. The other potential comp picks were canceled because the Giants signed guard Jon Runyan, tackle Jermaine Eluemunor, running back Devin Singletary, and backup quarterback Drew Lock.

You can argue that Eluemunor's signing was important to keep the offense viable, but the other ones were avoidable minor moves that cost them a fourth-, a sixth-, and a seventh-round pick.

If the Giants wanted to contend, they should have re-signed Barkley and McKinney. If the plan was a retool, the compensatory picks would have been more relevant than these mid-level signings.

Maybe the Saquon Barkley decision is overblown at this point. But Joe Schoen and the Giants did make several process mistakes, and they have been costly for the franchise.

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