Well, at least he’s not blaming Eli this week.
Giants coach Ben McAdoo, who has received surprisingly little scrutiny for subjecting receiver Odell Beckham to surprisingly little scrutiny after his disgusting-act touchdown celebration, placed the blame for it on himself, sort of.
“Penalties snap to whistle are penalties that happen, combative penalties in the game,” McAdoo said Wednesday, via Ralph Vacchiano of SNY. “You can clean those up with fundamentals. Pre-snap and post-[whistle] penalties, we have to clean up and that’s a part of it. Celebration penalties are things you can’t have. It’s a poor reflection on me, on the program and on the organization.”
You can’t have them, but they have had them. Once in Week Two (Evan Engram) and again in Week Three.
“We have a plan for it,” McAdoo said. “We’re going to handle it internally and we have a plan for it moving forward.”
There’s that “handle it internally” line again. Co-owner John Mara used it earlier this week, and McAdoo has repeated it. Without knowing specifically what the Giants have done to handle it, it’s impossible to know whether they’ve done enough.
It’s clear that McAdoo didn’t do nearly enough to address the issue after Engram drew a flag for a vulgar celebration in Week Two -- an infraction that, when coupled with a kickoff that went out of bounds, gave the Lions the ball on the New York 45. While McAdoo surely had plenty of other issues to deal with in the aftermath of that Week Two loss, he should have made it clear to the team after Engram’s penalty that there will be no more celebration penalties.
So either he didn’t, or he did and it didn’t take. Either way, it’s definitely a poor reflection on McAdoo. It’s the kind of poor reflection that, coupled with an inability to win football games, can make a current head coach a former head coach.
