Architects of Giants' Next Era Won't Allow 'Scars' of 2025 to Define Their Future

Joe Schoen's normal routine has had him at the facility and into his workout to start his day, around 5 a.m. every morning for years now. The difference, over the past few months, has been that the Giants' general manager knows, upon arrival, there's almost no chance he'll be the first one in the gym.

"He's got a further drive," John Harbaugh said, laughing at last month's owners meetings, and pointing out that he's still in temporary housing. "My drive right now is like seven minutes."

"He doesn't sleep," Schoen responded. "One night, literally, we were in my office at like 8:30, we're just shooting the breeze, probably two weeks ago. And the next morning, by 5 a.m., we were sitting in the weight room on the floor, stretching, having a 15-minute conversation on draft prep and how we do it, and all that stuff."

"Was that the night I texted you at like 12:20 a.m.?" Harbaugh asked, after Schoen clarified that it was a preworkout stretch for him, and postworkout stretch for the coach.

"And he does," Schoen said. "Every now and then, you get a 1 a.m. text because he can't sleep. But we're just talking ball. The communication has been great. It has to be. That's how good organizations do it."

The Giants, after a dismal decade or so, are trying to get back to being just that, and these conversations, casual and otherwise, are at the foundation of how they're doing it.

This sort of story on a new regime usually includes some detailed account of how the position coaches taught scouts the offense and defense, or some retreat the owner took everyone on, or how a series of dinners led to chemistry building between people who had to get to know each other. And there are cases, to be sure, of things working out through those sorts of methods.

"Life is best understood looking back. So you look back-this is what it was-and I don't really have any big regrets. But it's best lived going forward. Let's dig in, let's talk. We got challenges, man. I don't got time to be sitting there going, Gee, I wonder what I could've done differently in Baltimore. I don't know, clock's ticking, draft's coming up."

John Harbaugh

That's just not exactly how it's gone in New York in the three months since the Giants landed the biggest fish in the 2026 coaching pond. Instead, Harbaugh and Schoen have worked to build their relationship, and fuse their philosophies the old-fashioned way-through organic interaction, conversation, agreement and disagreement. Both acknowledge their recent pasts. "We talk about scars a lot," Schoen says. "We all got scars."

But to each, this isn't so much about introspection as it is about wasting no time taking all the lessons they've learned, and bruises they carry, and putting them to work. And simply finding out about each other along the way.

"That's history," Harbaugh says. "Life is best understood looking back. So you look back-This is what it was-and I don't really have any big regrets. But it's best lived going forward. Let's dig in, let's talk. We got challenges, man. I don't got time to be sitting there going, Gee, I wonder what I could've done differently in Baltimore. I don't know, clock's ticking, draft's coming up."

Spend some time around Schoen and Harbaugh, and you'll feel that urgency from both, and the energy, too. The clock is indeed ticking. With a lot still left to be done.

Arranged partnerships in the NFL

These sorts of arranged marriages have worked lately in the NFL. Three of the four conference finalists last season were led by GMs (or de facto GMs) who survived coach firings and helped their organizations hit home runs with the hires to follow. In two of the three cases, the Broncos and the Patriots, the incoming coach was an accomplished, established name with a clear vision for how he wanted to build (the other hire, by the way, was Sean McVay).

And a big key in the cases of Sean Payton and Mike Vrabel was that Broncos GM George Paton and Patriots EVP Eliot Wolf were low-ego executives, happy to meld their methods to a coach's ideals. Which happens to be what Harbaugh himself witnessed in working with Ravens legend Ozzie Newsome as a first-time head coach two decades ago.

"The thing I remember about Ozzie was I was really taken aback by the fact that here's a Hall of Fame guy in every way, and his humility is unbelievable," he said. "I mean, that's probably his greatest strength. And it's not a lack of confidence. It's just basic, fundamental humility and respect for the people. And I do see that in Joe, just a team player. You want to work together; you're confident. And you know you're putting together something good."

That was important because Harbaugh's vision for the Giants-further brought to life through conversations with Tom Coughlin ("Invaluable," Harbaugh says. "It would never happen without Tom, Tom loves the Giants, he loves the Mara family, and he loves me")-would be about a whole lot more than how many receivers or backs are on the field at once.

It was complete and total. Change, some of it difficult, was coming.

Harbaugh wanted a football operation not just firing on all cylinders, but one firing in unison. That meant breaking down silos, in a way, for example, where the medical side would work through the training room, and the training room would work back to performance, so players could come back faster, healthier and sturdier from injuries, and in a way that was based on their own situations, rather than an aggregate of the larger group.

Similarly, analytics would work together with personnel, working together with coaching, to create a singular path to get everyone on the same page in acquiring players.

"All that has to be tied together so it works this way together," Harbaugh said. "And you can't have break points in there."

That's why, when Harbaugh first walked in the building, he was pleasantly surprised to see how scouting and analytics and coaching are physically together, and working as resources for one another. "It's like, man, these [analysts] are right in the middle of the coaches and the scouts," Harbaugh said. "I'm like, This is what I've always wanted to do. And Joe's already got it set up. This is a beautiful format."

Which gave the coach a good baseline to work from as the overhaul began.

Harbaugh, Giants on the same page

When Harbaugh was considering his options in January, he recalled the advice he once gave his brother-in-law, former Georgia, Indiana and Marquette basketball coach Tom Crean: Go to a place you can win. "I probably felt best about the Giants that way," he says. "And then the more I delved into it, that kind of got confirmed. And then I prayed."

As Harbaugh was drawn to the Giants, the Giants were drawn to him. To fix, once and for all, everything that's gone wrong since Coughlin, the last truly big-ticket hire the Maras made, left after the 2015 season. They liked Harbaugh's leadership, track record and communication skills. And, as Schoen said, they felt like he could handle a market and environment that's "not easy for everyone."

But if it was going to work the way it did for Payton and Paton, and Vrabel and Wolf, then it would have to go beyond just making sense for the Giants to hire Harbaugh or for Harbaugh to take the job over all the others available.

"We were going to have to be on the same page for it to even get started," Harbaugh said. "And so I would just say, to me, it was a step-by-step process of not so much like, Oh, you know, we have to know each other, because we're going to be working together. It was more like, Hi, how are you doing? What's the situation? We just kind of started talking."

The first week, that happened, as they would've scripted it, naturally. There was no coaching staff in place yet. Schoen's staff was in Alabama at the Senior Bowl. So at the office, the coach and the GM worked together on everything that needed to get done. "And there were a lot of things," Harbaugh says. Assembling the coaching staff is where it started, and it would be a Harbaugh staff, with Ravens expats such as Greg Roman and Dennard Wilson coming on. But there were others that Schoen recommended he keep who would stick around.

Therein lay one of the new regime's early wins-retaining outside linebackers coach Charlie Bullen, who was the Giants' defensive play-caller at the end of 2025, and had the Cardinals pursuing him to be Mike LaFleur's first defensive coordinator.

"I'd never met Charlie Bullen," Harbaugh said. "I didn't know Charlie. But Joe told me Charlie's a really great coach. And I interviewed him, and he seemed great. Then, he had a chance to leave."

Instead, after seeing Harbaugh's plan, he chose to stay. Offensive assistants Chad Hall and Tim Kelly did, too. And others from the outside, like new OC Matt Nagy and quarterbacks coach Brian Callahan, arrived.

As that was all coming together, Harbaugh was-again, organically-integrating his work with the personnel department's, as free agency loomed.

"We didn't sit down and just say, Hey, this is our process and how we do free agency," Schoen says. "He sat back, and he got to see some of the pro meetings, how they were organizing and really narrowing the field for us. And then we narrowed it even more based on the values that we thought guys were going to be."

As the strategy was laid out, so too were the chances to get more early wins.

"Our strategy was basically ‘All gas,'" Harbaugh said. "It's all gas until when? Until we run out of gas. So that doesn't mean we're going to be reckless; it means we're going to stick to our plan. We're going to chase every opportunity, every player that wants to come here, as long as they stay within our range. And if they're in our range, we're all gas together."

Fortunately for the Giants, many of the values they set for players matched the market. Former Ravens Patrick Ricard, Isaiah Likely and Jordan Stout followed Harbaugh from Baltimore. Greg Newsome II, Tremaine Edmunds and Darnell Mooney were added, too.

"The success is we didn't miss out on any opportunities," Harbaugh says. "We didn't not get a guy where we were like, Oh man, we could've signed him for that?"

Which was a sign to everyone that, at least early on, it was all working.

‘I'm in the right place here'

Once they get each other going, the energy between Harbaugh and Schoen is palpable.

And it's not that the energy ever left Harbaugh, or that it's more intense now, because, as he says, "I was bringing it every single day in Baltimore-like a maniac." It's just a new sort of energy that comes with a new job, and being in a new place for the first time in a long time.

"I mean, I was excited about every day in Baltimore. You don't think I was fired up for that Pittsburgh game at the end?" he asked. "It's just different. But it's meant to be. When you're doing something, you feel like it's really meant to be, you feel like you're in the right place. I was in the right place in Baltimore, just like [Schoen was] in the right place in Buffalo [as assistant GM from 2017 to '21]. And now I'm in the right place here. Joe's in the right place here. And I'm fired up because I think we can do well."

On the day we sat down, Harbaugh and Schoen were eight days away from getting the players back in the building for the offseason program-and the coach's first chance to address all the guys at once. He was planning then, in his words, "The funnest meeting in the history of football that's ever been had. It'll be the best one, too. I tell Joe, [and] he laughs when I say that. It'll be the best meeting in the history of football."

Schoen did laugh, but he also wasn't doubting it would be.

Weeks earlier, after the Giants put the final touches on Harbaugh's first staff in New York, the coach said he told the GM, "It's gonna be the best staff meeting in the history of football."

Schoen laughed then, too. But after the meeting, something interesting happened.

"I had four guys unsolicited say, That is the best staff meeting I've ever been in in my life," Schoen says. "I said to a couple of them, Did Coach tell you to come tell me that? They were, No, why? He called his shot."

The players' meeting held two Tuesdays ago is now in the books.

And the Giants are moving toward the next task, which is the draft, and, to borrow his term, Harbaugh's all gas on that one, too.

"This guy does more work in the draft than any coach I've ever been around," Schoen says. "The bar is high with his passion for the draft and the amount of work he does; he's always learning. And I always want to learn. And, obviously, he's got a tremendous track record, and he's been in an organization for the previous 18 years that won a lot of football games. So we have a process in place, but we're always open to being more efficient.

"It's whatever we need to do to get to the endgame."

The endgame, of course, isn't feeling good about these things in March and April, when everyone is undefeated. But these steps are, most certainly, good and necessary ones to take, and the good news is Harbaugh and Schoen have taken them thus far together.

A cohesive football operation

So getting back to the scars that Harbaugh and Schoen bear from 2025, no, there wasn't some sort of gazing into the mirror that the coach or GM did after last year.

"I think it's just a clumsy way of thinking. It's too generic. You're doing that every day," Harbaugh says. "Every day, you're looking at everything you do, How can I do this better? How can I say this better? You have regrets, you have things you're proud of. But on the whole, I think you feel the same way. I look back at everything we did, and I feel really great about it. I know one thing, I know personally, I did the very best I could do every single day."

"That's probably the best way to put it-you're always doing that," Schoen agreed. "We make so many decisions in a day. You're always evaluating the decisions you make. Again, I was deep into the head coaching search, so there was no time, and this week is probably the first time, or this past weekend, we both kind of came up to take a breath for a short amount of time. And now we're already thinking about the draft and all that."

For the record, in Arizona, with that little sliver of downtime, the two did take down a couple of bottles of Silver Oak, with the Giants' contingent in town for the meetings.

And just as that came naturally, so, too, have the rest of the past few months.

"I was in the right place in Baltimore, just like [Schoen was] in the right place in Buffalo [as assistant GM from 2017 to '21]. And now I'm in the right place here. Joe's in the right place here. And I'm fired up because I think we can do well."

Harbaugh

What's resulted is a football operation that-at least at this early point, before any games have been lost or real football adversity has been faced-looks cohesive and together, even as they navigate early bumps like Dexter Lawrence II's contract standoff.

Within it, too, are a lot of folks who brought the same sorts of scars with them to East Rutherford that Harbaugh and Schoen took on before joining up. Nagy and Callahan were fired as head coaches. Wilson was also let go as part of Callahan's staff in Tennessee. Roman was dismissed by Jim Harbaugh's Chargers.

"The only people that don't have any scars are the people who haven't been in any fights," Harbaugh says. "Because in fights, real fights, you get punched in the face. And I promise you, if you haven't been in any fights, you don't know how to fight. You're going to get your ass kicked at some point. You have to pick yourself off the mat at some point. And I really don't know how that guy [who hasn't been in a fight] is going to respond to that.

"I do know how Greg Roman is going to respond. I do know how Dennard Wilson is going to respond. I do know how Joe Schoen is going to respond. I know how I'm going to respond."

Which is why Harbaugh's so confident that what he's building now is sustainable, and that the good feelings of March and April will still be there in November and December. He knows the resilience of the guys he's brought and joined is real. And those bonds they're letting grow organically are, too.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Architects of Giants' Next Era Won't Allow 'Scars' of 2025 to Define Their Future.

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This story was originally published April 17, 2026 at 5:00 AM.