Ex-Giants HC Ben McAdoo lands new gig, will be consultant for Cowboys (Report)

Ben McAdoo will reportedly be working for the Cowboys as a consultant. As you may know, he spent 29 total games as the Giants head coach.

Former Giants head coach and offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo has landed a new NFL gig as a consultant for the Dallas Cowboys, per NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo. McAdoo worked as the Jaguars quarterbacks coach last year after spending the 2016 season and a part of the 2017 campaign as the leader of Big Blue’s coaching staff.

The #Cowboys have hired former #Giants head coach Ben McAdoo as a consultant, sources say. Once a #Packers QB coach under Mike McCarthy, now back with him in Dallas.

— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) May 26, 2021

Fans, of course, remember how McAdoo’s head coaching tenure with New York was somewhat successful, but also somewhat disastrous.

You can choose to reminisce on the good days (2016) when McAdoo took a Giants team to the playoffs for the first time in five years. That season, the Giants finished 11-5 and eventually came up short against the Packers in the Wild Card Round — a game that’ll forever be linked to the infamous boat picture.

However, you could additionally choose to remember McAdoo for his numerous failures throughout the devastating 2017 season, a year in which he won two of 12 games and made the controversial decision to bench Eli Manning for the team’s matchup with the Raiders. McAdoo was then fired a day after the Giants lost to Oakland to fall to 2-10.

The Eli benching, all these years later

People still may debate the validity of that choice to ruin Eli’s 210-game “Iron Man” start streak.

On one hand, some might think that season’s mishaps weren’t on the veteran signal-caller whatsoever.

On the other hand, some might believe the Giants needed to find a spark and move in a different direction, and one of the more significant ways to pull the trigger was to make a change at the most important position on the field.

I will say this just about 3.5 years after witnessing the Eli benching: McAdoo had the right overall idea — the Giants maybe should’ve moved on from Manning earlier than they actually did (in 2019).

However, when the former New York head coach finally put that idea into existence and made a move, he did it in the worst way possible.

You could go back and forth on alternative maneuvers that would’ve been superior — the moral of the story, however, is that if you were going to rip the band-aid off at some point, promoting Geno Smith to be the starter in a meaningless game probably wasn’t the correct route.