The education of New York Giants GM Joe Schoen

Unsurprisingly, the verdict around the NFL and among New York Giants fans is that Joe Schoen had a great three days at the NFL Draft. None of it means anything until the games begin, but for a team coming off a dispiriting 3-14 season, the optimism now is higher than anyone might have imagined.

For whatever reason, Schoen and his staff now seem to be better drafters than they were when they first came in. In some sense that’s not a surprise. Schoen was hired by the Giants on January 21, 2022. Brian Daboll was hired as head coach a week later. That gave them less than three months on the job to evaluate the existing roster, get to know their college and pro personnel departments mostly inherited from the previous regime, and deal with free agency.

Of course most new GMs and head coaches face the same thing, since firings and hirings usually take place when the previous season ends in January. What made Schoen’s challenge different from, say, that of Adam Peters in Washington is that he inherited a roster whose contracts put the Giants $40M in the red. Thus in his first off-season, Schoen mostly released or did not re-sign players, and he was only able to sign low-end free agents on bargain basement contracts. Peters did not have that problem, and it showed in all the contracts he was able to give out to high-end or mid-range veterans such as Bobby Wagner, Frankie Luvu, Jeremy Chinn, etc.

During the bye week last season, Schoen alluded to the fact that the Giants were short on players heading into the 2022 draft, and this might have been his motivation for the multiple trade-downs he performed and the players he chose. The next year, 2023, he did just the opposite, moving up in the draft twice to grab specific players. In both cases, the argument can be made that he did it to fill needs rather than to get the best player available (BPA) at any point in the draft.

There’s nothing wrong with trading down to accumulate picks. In fact it’s considered to be a desirable draft strategy…as long as the picks you make are good values. The reaction to most of Schoen’s 2022 draft, though, after the Kayvon Thibodeaux and Evan Neal picks, was: Who? Chris Pflum, who does exhaustive research every year on prospects for the draft for BBV, hadn’t even profiled any of Schoen’s picks from Round 2 onward until I believe Schoen’s final pick in that draft (Darrian Beavers).

The last two drafts have been different. Let’s take a look at all four of his drafts and see the progression in draft skill over time:

Data courtesy of NFL Mock Draft Database and Pro Football Reference

The chart above allows us to address two questions: (1) Where and how often did Schoen overdraft prospects to fill needs, and how often did he get good value? (2) How often have his picks not lived up to expectations, and how often have they exceeded them?

The second columns in the chart are pre-draft consensus big board rankings of players from the NFL Mock Draft Database. The third columns compare the draft position at which Schoen chose each player to their position on the consensus big board. Green = good value, red = reaching.

The progression of results over Schoen’s four drafts to date is striking. Schoen takes a lot of heat for the Thibodeaux and Neal picks, but that’s revisionist history – the NFL “intelligentsia” had those players ranked Nos. 3 and 4 heading into the draft. After that, though, there’s clear evidence of reaching for need, poor scouting, or a combination of the two. Every single pick was taken not just sooner, but a lot sooner, than the community imagined them going, anywhere from 50 to 238 places higher than they should have been drafted. Not until the Beavers pick, Schoen’s last, did he get a good buy according to pre-draft wisdom, though after a promising pre-season start, Beavers was never the same after he tore his ACL.

Of course pre-draft wisdom plus $3 will get you a ride on the subway. See Zach Wilson, Trey Lance, and countless others in NFL history. The final column shows where each player ranks today among his classmates in Pro Football Reference’s weighted Approximate Value (wAV) after having been in the league for one or more years. The wAV metric in essence combines production and availability. The only player from that first Schoen class who has clearly outperformed his draft position is Micah McFadden (tied for 34th in wAV but drafted No. 146). Thibodeaux is only a little below his draft position in wAV rank, i.e., while he hasn’t been the dominant player we hoped, he’s nonetheless a productive starter. Neal of course is way below the expectation for a No. 7 pick. A few players who are still Giants such as Daniel Bellinger, Dane Belton, and D.J. Davidson are at least in the ballpark of where their draft slot suggested they should be.

The 2023 draft class is very different in one sense, but more of the same in another sense. Unlike 2022, there were no head-scratching picks. Actually, just the opposite, i.e., lots of green and not much red. Based on pre-draft ranking, Schoen took Deonte Banks just about where he was expected to go, and arguably he got good buys on John Michael Schmitz (taken No. 57, ranked No. 36) and Jalin Hyatt (taken No. 73, ranked No. 38), albeit after sacrificing picks in two trade-ups. All of these players were well-known pre-draft and made sense when the pick was made. Obviously none of them has worked out so far, with their wAV rank much lower than their draft position (not that any fan needs this table to know that).

The opposite is true of two of the Giants’ late picks. Tre Hawkins III and Jordon Riley were not seen as draftable players by the community (Nos. 545, 557 on the big board). Both however played, and sometimes not too badly. Riley’s wAV rank is mostly that high only because Shane Bowen was looking for warm bodies to send out on the IDL by the second half of last season, but in fact he gave them decent run defense at least part of the time. Tre Hawkins only saw action in two games before being injured, but he was playing great against New Orleans, including an interception, before his injury. When you get anything at all from your sixth- and seventh-round picks, that’s a plus, so maybe the Giants’ scouting was starting to improve by Year 2 of Schoen’s tenure.

Now looking at the 2024 class, we see something very different. Every player was drafted fairly close to their position on the big board except for Darius Muasau (and the Giants had no seventh-round pick so if they wanted him, Round 6 is where they had to take him). More importantly, all six draftees finished within the top 100 of the 2024 NFL draft class in wAV. Four of them finished in the top 50, and Phillips and Johnson would have finished higher had they not each missed a few games with injuries, since wAV rewards volume in addition to good play. In other words, by last year Schoen was not reaching on any of his picks, and the picks were seeing the field and performing well enough to continue to see action.

Now in 2025, we see something yet again different from the previous three classes. Abdul Carter was drafted exactly in the position big boards said he’d be. Jaxson Dart was taken a few places higher than had been projected, but that’s par for the course for quarterback prospects in today’s NFL. Every other player was selected later than where they were on the big board, i.e., almost this entire draft was great value in that sense.

That may seem odd, because other than Carter, who was purely a BPA pick for a team whose pass rush was already pretty good, every other pick was considered either a glaring need (QB, DT, OL) or at least a moderate need (CB, RB, TE). Yet somehow, Schoen managed to get need to coincide with value. Day 3 was the most interesting aspect of that. At Saturday’s press conference, Brian Daboll discussed the selections of Cam Skattebo and Marcus Mbow at Nos. 105 and 154, respectively:

“Even to get Mbow, credit Joe there. Again, we’re sitting there talking about him or Skattebo with that first pick, and he’s like, we’ll go with Skattebo, and then Mbow was there however many picks later, so we got two guys that we were going to take — if Skattebo left, we were going to take Mbow.”

Four other running backs came off the board in Round 4 after Schoen selected Skattebo, but only one offensive lineman was taken in Round 4, so Schoen made the right call. Not even he was sure why Mbow was still on the board at No. 154:

“When you take these guys, sometimes you get texts from around the league from other personnel people or general managers if you took a guy they were going to take, and he’s one that there were a lot of texts, just the value where we got him,” Schoen said.

“I’m not really sure what happened, but glad he was there. That happens sometimes in the fourth round.”

So maybe it was luck, maybe it was shrewd strategy. And of course the wAV column on the chart for the 2025 class is blank, since none of these players has played a single down in the NFL yet. A year from now we may or may not have the same view of the value Schoen got from this draft class.

Whatever the reason – learning lessons from bad previous decisions, or better people hired for scouting since Schoen inherited Dave Gettleman’s staff in 2022, or just a better “process” (Schoen’s favorite word) for getting information and translating it into draft strategy – Schoen seems to have become better at drafting every year. That process seems to lean heavily on Senior Bowl meetings and Top 30 visits, which have become ridiculously accurate indicators of whom the Giants are going to draft. We’ll see whether it translates into a better record on the field in 2025 and beyond.