Are Giants actually entertaining Odell Beckham Jr. return?
It is ridiculous that we are doing this again, but we are doing it again.
Could Odell Beckham Jr. come back to the Giants? Head coach John Harbaugh — who coached the polarizing wideout with the Ravens — didn’t say yes. But he also didn’t say no!
“The obvious pat answer would be you look at every option, right?” Harbaugh told reporters Monday at the NFL owners meeting in Phoenix. “If Odell’s an option, we’ll be looking at him for sure.
“He and I do talk, we do text. We’ve maintained a really great relationship. He’s one of my very favorite people in the world. It’s not like you don’t talk to guys about things like that. And certainly we have. We’ll just have to see where it all goes. What’s best for him, what’s best for the Giants. That’s the No. 1 thing. It is what is best for our team. Any player — if he helps you be a better team and can make you better, you pursue that. So we’ll just have to see where that goes.”
Nowhere, if the Giants have any sense.
To be fair to Harbaugh: This could be — should be — nothing more than a diplomatic response to a ridiculous question.
It’s great that Beckham looked good during a celebrity flag football event. The guy is also 33 and has missed 57% of the regular season games he could have played over the last five years. And that includes sitting out all of last year.
It was colossal dumb of the Giants to entertain a Beckham return back in 2022, but at least there was an argument to be made. The team was making a surprise playoff run, it lacked offensive weapons and then-coach Brian Daboll and GM Joe Schoen were in their first years and likely trying to appease Beckham’s big-name buddies in the locker room.
No such case can be made now. The last thing the Giants need to saddle Jaxson Dart with is an over-the-hill Beckham chirping for the ball. The pining for his return from fans and some media members also needs to stop. People act like he’s Tom Seaver or Lawrence Taylor, but he’s actually closer to Matt Harvey. And that’s unfair to Harvey, to be honest, because Harvey actually won something when he was here.
No rings, no Ring of Honor, no return. Beckham is nothing more than a flashy footnote in Giants history. It’s time to finally move on.
James Kratch is a veteran sports reporter and editor. He currently reports on the youth sports industry for Buying Sandlot and was previously ESNY's managing editor. Before that he spent a decade at NJ Advance Media (The Star-Ledger and NJ.com), where he covered high school sports, the Giants and Rutgers.
