Giants Hire Mike Shula As Offensive Coordinator And Quarterbacks Coach
Pretty meh news out of the Meadowlands. I know Pat Shurmur is supposed to be the big swinging dick on offense and will be calling the plays with the Giants. But I still wanted to have a coordinator with a shred of excitement attached to his name like Big Bad James Bettcher. And Mike Shula is definitely not that. He has a dad that won a bunch of games for the Colts and Dolphins and million years ago, but that’s about it.
Granted it’s hard to blame anyone else but yourself when you hire your head coach late, miss out on some of the hot assistants that took jobs before the NFC Championship Game was over, and get blocked from interviewing others.
But I’ve just never been a Mike Shula fan. Apparently neither were the Panthers since they fired him after as soon as they lost to the Saints in the playoffs. And the Panthers fans I have seen on Twitter seem to be either laughing at the Giants or just tweeting one of the many pictures of Cam Newton smiling.
I know Shula had the highest-scoring offense in 2015 in between a whole lot of meh seasons.
But those numbers also came with Cam Newton being a fucking freak and putting up an MVP performance along with a ridiculous Carolina defense. Shula took over the Panthers offense as Cam was entering his third year in the league and was ready to take off, but it never really did outside of Cam’s ridiculous 2015. Is Cam coming to the Meadowlands with Shula? Is Eli going to dust off his wheels and take off his jersey to reveal a Superman logo? Is any QB that may be there at the 2 pick even close to the prospect that Cam Newton was? No? Well then I’m pretty concerned that this was just Dave Gettleman hiring a familiar face in order to fill the position for an offense that varied between bad and unwatchable last season. Again, Shurmur is going to be calling the plays. But Shula is going to have a huge role in how the next Giants QB is developed. I’ll admit that I don’t know if the other candidates that were rumored were going to be a perfect fit either. Duce Staley would be a huge question mark as an OC even though the Eagles running game was a goddamn nightmare to opposing teams this season despite having no real studs. And Darrell Bevell knows a thing or two about coordinating an offense with a shitty offensive line. But he was also no lock to be a and will also forever be linked to not giving Marshawn Lynch the ball at the 1 with the Super Bowl on the line. But Shula has always just been wallpaper in my mind and after watching the offense go from good to bad in a 2 year period, I was hoping for more than wallpaper with a famous last name.
Like everything else from the Gettleman hire on down, we just have to hope for the best and pray that seasons like last season don’t happen for a very, very, veryyyyy long time.