Pat Leonard: Joe Schoen, Brian Daboll will have a hard time selling good intentions to Giants’ locker room

Seven games is a long time.

Seven games is a long time for Dexter Lawrence, Bobby Okereke, Darius Slayton, Brian Burns and the Giants’ players to stomach this nonsense.

Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll are trying to sell that Tommy DeVito can give the Giants the best spark as their new quarterback after shutting down Daniel Jones on Monday. They are trying to sell that this gives the team the best chance to win.

Good luck getting them to buy it.

“You’ve got to respect it as a player even though you don’t like it,” Lawrence told reporters Tuesday at a charity event. “He’s the QB1. To me, the best quarterback on the team. But they see things differently. I guess that’s all that matters.”

Schoen and Daboll are putting DeVito in an impossible position and alienating veteran back-up Drew Lock in the process.

DeVito had Saquon Barkley and Andrew Thomas on the Giants’ offense with him last season, and DeVito still led the NFL in sack percentage (15.5%) last season for quarterbacks with more than 33 dropbacks.

He made some key plays to beat the Green Bay Packers, but the Giants’ three wins were propped up by 12 takeaways, including 11 forced by Wink Martindale’s defense and one by Thomas McGaughey‘s special teams unit.

Todd Bowles’ Buccaneers pressure packages will be relentless on Sunday at MetLife Stadium, and as Schoen and Daboll continue to put a worse product on the field, the players are going to crack.

Remember: we are more than a full year removed from Lawrence saying that he was tired of building and it was time to start winning. That was before the 2023 NFL season.

Fast forward almost two seasons later, and the Giants’ players are being asked to play their hardest and pretend everything is fine while Jones gets scapegoated, the team loses its way toward another high draft pick and another year of their careers goes down the drain.

The optimistic argument for the Giants heading in the right direction is that they are going to keep losing games to land their next franchise QB. But try selling that to the Giants’ veterans as a positive or, better yet, as the organization’s plan.

If this Giants operation continues to look like a complete disaster coming out of the bye against Tampa Bay — who may be getting top receiver Mike Evans and top corner Jamel Dean — it is going to be impossible for Schoen and Daboll to keep this locker room from fracturing further.

Slayton already called former Giants corner Nick McCloud a “free man” on Instagram following Shane‘s vindictive release of the now-49ers corner because he wouldn’t take a pay cut.

Okereke liked an Instagram post that praised Saquon Barkley’s Eagles success in Philadelphia at the Giants’ expense.

Lawrence is on the record noting that Jones is the best quarterback on the team, which means the players see that his benching is motivated by something else.

And the fan base even seems to understand that the novelty of the feel-good DeVito story has worn off, and it’s now simply being used as a shield by the Giants organization to try to escape 2024 without facing proper accountability.

Scapegoating Jones for all the Giants losses is disrespectful.

Asking Lock to take a backseat to DeVito is disrespectful. How many other NFL teams in the history of the league have skipped over their No. 2 QB for the No. 3 without giving their top backup at least one start?

Asking Lawrence, Okereke, Slayton, Burns and the rest of the Giants to pretend everything is OK for seven more games of this pathetic season is disrespectful, too.

The ironic part about all of this is that last season, Barkley was the Giants player and leader who put lipstick on a pig and diplomatically served as the voice of the locker room.

He knew who Schoen was and what the Giants were. He knew how bad things were behind the scenes. And he kept a smiling face on all of it.

The question now is whether any of the remaining players will be willing to protect Schoen and Daboll now that they see this for what it is:

A poorly run organization that doesn’t have its priorities in order.

GIANTS SIGN BOYLE WITH JONES SHUT DOWN

The Giants signed QB Tim Boyle and OT Tyre Phillips to their practice squad and released TE/FB Jakob Johnson, OT Garret Greenfield and LB Curtis Bolton from their practice squad. Boyle is presumably here to serve as a scout-team QB so the Giants can keep Jones off the practice field entirely, since any injury on the Giants’ grounds would activate his $23 million injury guarantee for 2025.