Giants reportedly keeping Joe Judge, telling fans they don’t care at all

Joe Judge is reportedly coming back for a third season as the New York Giants continue to show they don’t care about their fans.

The 2021 season has become a remarkable one for the New York Giants, who have slowly become the worst-run organization in the NFL. Despite a litany of embarrassments down the stretch, including a bizarre 11-minute rant following a Week 17 loss to the Chicago Bears and six-straight double-digit losses to end the season, the Giants are likely bringing Joe Judge back for a third season, CBS Sports’ Josina Anderson reports.

Giants owner John Mara is still set to meet with Judge, who was ridiculed around the NFL yesterday for calling quarterback sneaks inside his own five-yard line to set up a punt, so the decision could still change as of this moment.

The Giants are moving on from GM Dave Gettleman, Anderson also reports, meaning that the new GM will inherit a head coach who has gone 10-23 over the past two seasons.

The Giants are risking a fan revolt by bringing Joe Judge back

Word has been circulating for weeks that Mara thinks he has found his version of Bill Belichick with Judge, who has led a team that has been a disaster for weeks. There has been a general apathy with the Giants’ fan base which resulted in roughly 15,000 people attending yesterday’s game against Washington, turning MetLife Stadium into a ghost town at best.

Another factor behind the organization’s decision to keep Judge appears to be a concern that firing him now would mark the third time in a row that the Giants have fired a head coach within two years of his hire, joining Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur. The problem with that philosophy is that Judge has proven that he isn’t a good NFL head coach and keeping him for the sake of avoiding the revolving door mentality is compounding the initial mistake of a bad hire.

Retaining Judge also will limit the interest level in the vacant GM job since any self-respecting candidate will want no part of a job that comes with minimal cap room, a roster devoid of talent, no sure-fire franchise quarterback and a head coach who has 10 wins in two years. The new GM will also be on a different timetable than Judge, who will want to win next year to save his job, which can lead to disastrous results for the franchise.

The Giants can look across the building for proof of that problem with the New York Jets, who started their cycle of dysfunction in 2013 by firing Mike Tannenbaum while retaining Rex Ryan as their head coach. The shotgun marriage of Ryan and John Idzik imploded after two years, leading the Jets down a disastrous road that has led their playoff drought to reach 11 years, by far the longest in the league.

Public sentiment against Judge has grown considerably as fans and former Giants like Michael Strahan have said the franchise is in a bad place. A clean reset is the best path forward and that doesn’t involve keeping a head coach that has won 10 games in two seasons while losing respectability in the process.