The Giants hired Dennard Wilson as their defensive coordinator, but he wasn’t the only one of John Harbaugh’s former Ravens assistants in the mix for the job.
Rex Ryan served as Baltimore’s defensive coordinator during Harbaugh’s first season as the team’s head coach in 2008. Ryan jumped from that job to the Jets’ head coaching position and Harbaugh told Ian O’Connor of TheAthletic.com that he spoke to Ryan about leaving ESPN to join MetLife Stadium’s other team.
“I talked to Rex about that job at length,” Harbaugh said. “Rex is a guy I love and have a lot of respect for.”
There’s no word on how those conversations played out, so it’s unclear if Ryan, who last coached with the Bills in 2016, was a real possibility to return to the coaching ranks this offseason. It’s not the first time that his name has been bandied about for a coaching role, but the longer he remains in the broadcasting world the likelier it is that he’s done calling plays on the sideline.
Giants Clips
Eli Manning was voted down by the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee, but what really surprised him was who else was voted down: Bill Belichick.
Manning, who has been one of the 15 modern-era finalists the last two years but was not voted in either time, said he was shocked when he heard that Belichick hadn’t made it either.
“Bill Belichick not making the Hall of Fame is pretty shocking,” Manning told ClutchPoints.com. “You have one of – if not maybe the greatest coach of all time — and what he built there in New England, and the amount of Super Bowls they went to, and AFC championships, let alone just the amount that they won, it was incredible. I can’t imagine a more deserving coach to make it in the Hall of Fame than him.”
Manning won two Super Bowls against Belichick, but neither his two championships with the Giants nor Belichick’s six with the Patriots were enough for a bust in Canton. At least not this year.
When former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed his lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022, the claim of systemic and chronic racial discrimination made it a landmark attack against the league. Flores’s efforts have had, to date, a much more significant impact.
Through a series of rulings during a four-year war over the question of whether the claims of Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton will be resolved in open court or (as the league strongly prefers) arbitration controlled by the Commissioner, Flores and company have torn down the league’s longstanding method for forcing employee legal claims into a secret, rigged, kangaroo court.
The problem is simple. The league wants civil cases filed against it to be determined not by an independent party but by the league itself. Finally, independent judges with the power to do so are telling the NFL that it cannot do so.
“The court’s decision recognizes that an arbitration forum in which the defendant’s own chief executive gets to decide the case would strip employees of their rights under the law,” attorneys Douglas H. Wigdor and David E. Gottlieb said Friday, after the latest decision scrapping the league’s practices. “It is long overdue for the NFL to recognize this and finally provide a fair, neutral and transparent forum for these issues to be addressed.”
And that’s really the next step. Instead of maintaining its current Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court, the NFL should do the right thing and abandon the heavy-handed practice of insisting that lawsuits filed against the league be presided over by the Commissioner.
The Commissioner, who recently defended the practice by saying, essentially, “it was like that when I got here,” shouldn’t want to do it. It’s a hopeless and irreconcilable conflict of interest.
Few if any other companies attempt to stack the deck in such a laughable, third world, banana republic way. Most companies realize it’s more than sufficient to force employees into arbitration handled by one of the various companies (like the American Arbitration Association) that exist for that purpose.
It’s still a much better forum for corporate America than the traditional judge-and-jury process. Especially since the various companies that provide arbitration services tend to skew toward the interests of the businesses that are responsible for creating the system that funnels them so much business.
But that’s not good enough for the NFL. Its longstanding approach to arbitration is proof positive that it wants to completely control anything and everything it can.
Finally, the NFL is losing control over legal claims made by non-players. The consequences sweep far beyond Flores, Wilks, and Horton. Every other team and league employee who is compelled to agree to the arbitration term in their contracts now have a pathway to avoiding a fundamentally unfair and un-American approach to justice.
For that reason, maybe it will be useful for the league to keep pushing its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming that at least five of the nine justices of the highest court in the country see this game for what it is, the end result will be a published opinion that becomes the law of the land as to the league, all of its teams, and every current and future employee who have no choice but to agree to a contract that forces them to allow the Commissioner to have final say over any and all grievances they ever may pursue.
Some have dismissed the emails exchanged by Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and Jeffrey Epstein as evidence of nothing more than the normal behavior of “consenting adults.” That grossly oversimplifies the situation.
Apart from the skeevy content of the messages back and forth between Tisch and Epstein, the broader context is critical. This wasn’t a situation in which a friend was linking a friend to another friend who was looking for friendship. This was what Epstein did to build and maintain his bizarre influence among rich and powerful men. He found them women.
Epstein’s ability to leverage his connections to “help” the women he recruited relied on the ability to direct them to men who had the juice to do so. And Tisch, a film producer, was ostensibly one of those men.
Consider the most important aspect of the recent article from The Athletic, which generally demonstrated that Tisch’s claim of a “brief association” with Epstein was anything but. The reporting from The Athletic potentially links the Epstein-Tisch “association” to a woman who recently told her story to Radio France One.
The woman said Epstein had introduced her to an “American producer” in 2013. The woman and the producer met at his “New York residence on the top floor of a building with a sprawling view of the city.”
Per The Athletic, public records reveal that, in 2013, Tisch was renting a "$60,000-a-month, 13-room penthouse in the Trump Park Avenue building.”
Here’s what the woman told Radio France One, via The Athletic: "[The producer] asked what I hoped to make of my life. I told him about my plans. . . . I could see he was watching me talk, but he was not truly listening. . . . We sat down on a leather couch, a screen came down, and he showed me a [bike] race. I didn’t really understand what I had to do with that story. Then he starts to put his hand on the inside of my thighs. I threw out my hand and I said no. . . . He said to me: ‘You are a very smart girl.’ . . . I ran. I rushed into the elevator. I don’t even know how I got myself home.”
The woman said she received a call from Epstein the next day.
“He told me that I was an idiot, that I was never going to make anything of my life,” the woman said.
The takeaway is obvious. The behavior explained by the woman reflects the same kind of predatory behavior that people like Harvey Weinstein allegedly (or actually) engaged in, tying career advancement to sexual favors. While not necessarily illegal, it’s far from proper.
And it gives the NFL something tangible to investigate, beyond the content of the emails. The league can, if it chooses, attempt to determine whether the producer in question was Tisch. If it was, the NFL needs to decide whether that behavior runs afoul of the Personal Conduct Policy.
The overriding question is whether the NFL will wait for a smoking gun to be stuffed in its face through reporting from The Athletic or the Wall Street Journal or some other outlet, or whether the league will realize based on the available information that doing nothing is not acceptable. That if owners are indeed held to a higher standard than players, there’s an obligation to roll up the sleeves and get to work at searching for independent evidence and asking Tisch tough questions.
Will they? We’ll see. But as we’ve learned as it relates to the broader reality of the “Epstein files,” this isn’t something that is going to be forgotten when the next bright, shiny object comes along.
The Giants made Dawn Aponte’s hiring official, naming her the team’s senior vice president of football operations and strategy.
Aponte had worked as the NFL’s chief football administrative officer since 2017.
In her role, she is responsible for strategic planning for football operations, analytics, salary cap management, player contract negotiations, compliance and working closely with the college and pro personnel departments.
At the league office, Aponte was responsible for driving football operations initiatives, facilitating communication and management of day-to-day football operations and assisting in building relationships with club owners, presidents and executives. She played a leading role on all health and safety-related initiatives.
Aponte previously worked as an executive with RSE Ventures, an international sports, entertainment and tech firm co-founded by Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and club vice chairman Matt Higgins.
She was with the Dolphins from 2010-16, last serving as executive vice president of football administration. There, she overlapped with current Giants general manager Joe Schoen. In addition, Dennis Hickey, the Giants’ assistant director of player personnel, was Miami’s General Manager for three seasons (2014-16).
Aponte joined the Dolphins after one year as vice president of football administration with the Browns. Before that, she spent three years as vice president of labor finance with the NFL Management Council.
She started her career in football as an accounting intern with the Jets, where she spent more than 15 years (1991-2006) in various capacities, including as the club’s senior director of football administration. Bill Parcells was head coach of the Jets from 1997-99, while Bill Belichick was his defensive coordinator.
John Harbaugh has his first Giants coaching staff in place and it features a lot of familiar faces.
Fifteen of the coaches on the staff worked under Harbaugh with the Ravens. They are defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson, assistant head coach/special teams coordinator Chris Horton, assistant to the head coach/defensive assistant Megan Rosburg, defensive quality control coach Brendan Clark, defensive pass game coordinator Donald D’Alesio, assistant strength coach Brian Ellis, defensive line coach Dennis Johnson, assistant linebackers coach Matt Pees, football analyst/quality control coach Noah Riley, assistant defensive line coach Matt Robinson, senior offensive assistant Greg Roman, offensive quality control coach Adam Schrack, director of strength and conditioning Ron Shrift, running backs coach Willie Taggart, and assistant special teams coach T.J. Weist.
Three coaches will remain on staff after working for the Giants in 2025. Run game coordinator/outside linebackers coach Charlie Bullen, tight ends coach Tim Kelly, and wide receivers coach Chad Hall make up that group.
Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, inside linebackers coach Frank Bush, defensive backs coach Addison Lynch, offensive line coach Mike Bloomgren, passing game coordinator/quarterbacks coach Brian Callahan, offensive quality control coach Mike Snyder, executive director of player performance Aaron Wellman, assistant strength and conditioning coach Sam Coad, director of performance nutrition Matthew Frakes, assistant strength and conditioning coach Mark Naylor, and assistant director of strength and conditioning Drew Wilson round out the staff.
Charlie Bullen will no longer be the Giants’ defensive coordinator, but he will be on the team’s staff in 2026.
Mike Garafolo of NFL Media reports that Bullen agreed to a contract extension with the team and will be pulling out of searches for coordinator jobs with other teams. Bullen will also have the title of run game coordinator on John Harbaugh’s staff.
Bullen opened last season as the outside linebackers coach and moved into the interim defensive coordinator role after the Giants fired Shane Bowen. Bullen drew interest in several coordinator searches around the league, but will spend at least one more year with the Giants before moving into that role on a permanent basis.
Bullen has also coached for the Cardinals and Dolphins in the NFL and he was on the Illinois staff in 2023 before returning to the league with the Giants.
The NFL’s secret, rigged, kangaroo court is on life support.
In the lawsuit filed four years ago by former Dolphins coach Brian Flores, the presiding judge has reversed a prior order sending some of the claims to arbitration. Now, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has concluded that all claims will be litigated in open court.
The ruling means that the Flores claims against the NFL, the Dolphins, the Giants, the Broncos, and the Texans will be handled in court, not arbitration. It also applies to the claims made by Steve Wilks against the Cardinals, and by Ray Horton against the Titans.
Friday’s decision flows from last year’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which denied arbitration as to the remaining Flores claims based on the NFL’s insistence that Commissioner Roger Goodell control the process. That same “fatal flaw” (as Judge Valerie Caproni described it) impacts all efforts to compel arbitration.
The league will undoubtedly fight the result. Although Goodell defended the practice during last week’s Super Bowl press conference, it is fundamentally unfair for the person hired and paid by the teams to be resolving legal claims made against his employers. No one in that position can be fair and impartial.
The NFL hates external oversight. It wants to control its business, and it hopes to keep any dirty laundry tightly under wraps.
The league previously filed a petition for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of whether the arbitration requirement is legitimate. Whatever the final outcome, it’s long overdue that the highest court in the country examine and resolve whether it’s appropriate for any organization to require employees to submit their legal claims not to an independent party but to the boss.
The Cardinals have made a hire at special teams coordinator.
Per Ian Rapoport of NFL Media, Arizona is bringing in Michael Ghobrial for the role.
Ghobrial, 38, spent the last two seasons as the Giants’ special teams coordinator.
Before that, Ghobrial spent three seasons as Jets assistant special teams coordinator. He worked alongside new Cardinals head coach Mike LaFleur at that stop, as LaFleur served as Jets offensive coordinator from 2021-2022.
The Seahawks, if the NFL concocts its schedule in the usual way, will open the 2026 season with a home game on Thursday, September 10. And with both the 49ers and Rams reportedly set to play Week 1 in Melbourne, two viable options to get the short straw in Seattle will be out of the mix.
But there are still plenty of good matchups, given a 2026 home schedule for the Seahawks that is chock full of competitive teams.
Beyond the NFC West rivals, the Seahawks will host the Chiefs, Chargers, Bears, Cowboys, Giants, and Patriots. Every one of those games has appeal.
The Chargers and Giants would introduce the wrinkle of Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald squaring off against one of his former bosses, Jim and John Harbaugh. The Chiefs have the Patrick Mahomes (and maybe Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift) angle. The Cowboys are always a major draw. The Bears will be one of the “hot” teams for 2026.
And while a Super Bowl rematch may not have much sizzle given what happened on Sunday, it would still be a Super Bowl rematch.
Even a game against the Cardinals could be compelling, since they have a new coach and presumably will have a new quarterback. (Seattle and Arizona played an overtime game in Week 4 of the 2025 season.)
It nevertheless remains possible that Whoever vs. Seahawks won’t be the first game of the season. 49ers-Rams may need to be played before the opening Thursday in order to reduce the significant travel/jet-lag burden.
Still, if the existing approach holds, it’ll be Seattle against someone as they hang their latest banner on the first Thursday night of the season. One of the many decisions the NFL will need to make about the 2026 schedule will entail selecting the opponent for what should be a fairly significant game.
