Keeping Odell Beckham Jr. happy needs to be a priority for the Giants

Beckham, not Eli Manning, is the Giants’ future. They need to make sure they’re doing right by their receiver.

There’s no “I” in team.

No individual is bigger than the whole.

The clichés are grounded in truth, but there’s also the simple reality that certain players are afforded more leeway than others. If Aaron Rodgers takes subtle shots at the Packers’ playcalling, it’s bad news for Mike McCarthy, not Rodgers. It wouldn’t be smart if DeShone Kizer did it, though.

The difference between Rodgers and Kizer is obvious. Rodgers is a superstar the Packers can’t live without. Kizer is a backup quarterback, a replaceable cog in the machine.

That’s why the New York Giants’ hands are tied after Odell Beckham Jr. opted to criticize the team’s offense and quarterback Eli Manning. If there’s one player on the Giants who can get away with that, it’s Beckham.

Beckham has 39 receiving touchdowns and 4,886 yards in just 52 career games. He was the fastest receiver ever to reach 100 receptions, 200 receptions, and 300 receptions. Given his torrid pace and the fact he’s still just 25, Beckham has a real chance at making a dent in the record books. Those prolific stats are the reason he can get away with speaking his mind about a two-time Super Bowl champ like Manning.

The Giants have to know what they have in Beckham

The team can’t be that surprised Beckham chose to be a little too truthful in an interview. Since he arrived in 2014, Beckham has been unafraid of expressing himself.

All things considered, he didn’t say anything that inflammatory in the ESPN interview that caused a stir:

“I don’t feel like I’m being given the opportunity to be the very best that I can, to bring that every single day — and that’s really all I want to do, to bring that every single day. I don’t want to be held back anymore. Since I’ve been here I’ve put up numbers, records have been broken and all those good things, not to say mean nothing to me, but I know they could have been double, or triple whatever they are now. That’s the part that bothers me. I want to win. I want to be great at what I do.”

He questioned why the Giants don’t throw passes farther than 20 yards, and the only interesting thing about his comments about Manning was he didn’t immediately deny the quarterback is part of the issue.

Publicly complaining about others dragging your stats down isn’t the greatest look. On the other hand, Beckham’s comments paint a picture of a hungry player with lofty goals and a desire to be an all-time great. There are worse problems to have than that.

It’s also not atypical of the position. Many of the greatest receivers in history have wanted more targets. Keyshawn Johnson even wrote a book called Just Give Me the Damn Ball! a couple years into his NFL career.

On the field, Beckham has been a little too passionate, at times. He’s been fined 11 times in his NFL career for a total of $221,546. He also received a one-game suspension for a wild battle with Josh Norman in 2015 that crossed the line into dangerous territory.

Away from the gridiron, Beckham has been one of the NFL’s most recognizable figures and that has put him under the microscope. While he’s stayed out of any serious trouble, the extra attention has created a few headaches for the Giants.

In March, a viral video showed the receiver with a model, some pizza, and a couple substances that looked illegal.

“It’s too often he allows himself to be put in bad situations and uses bad judgment,” Giants owner John Mara said a couple weeks later, via USA Today.

In January 2017, there was hand-wringing about a photo that showed Beckham and other Giants receivers on a boat with singer Trey Songz days before a playoff game against the Packers. The photo dominated headlines leading up to the game — a 38-13 loss in which Beckham had three drops, although he said there was no connection between the photo and his performance.

New York knew all of this when it gave him a five-year, $90 million extension that made him the highest-paid receiver ever and keeps him under contract through the 2023 season.

The Giants hitched their trailer to Beckham

If things go really south between Beckham and the Giants for some reason, cutting him before the end of the 2020 season would be difficult. They could recoup $11.75 million in cap space by releasing him in 2021 and $15 million in 2022 or 2023.

But realistically, they decided in August that the future of their franchise has Beckham center stage. The same can’t be said for Manning, or just about any other player on the roster aside from Saquon Barkley.

It’s difficult to imagine Manning, 37, as the starting quarterback for the Giants in 2020. His numbers tailed off in 2016 and 2017, and while they’ve bounced back so far in 2018, there are still 22 quarterbacks with more touchdowns this season.

Even making it to 2019 would be an accomplishment for Manning, who has a $23.2 cap hit next season, the final year of his contract with the team. The Giants can save $17 million of that by cutting the quarterback by the middle of March.

Either way, Beckham is a piece for the Giants’ long-term future and Manning isn’t anymore. And that’s not a bad thing, considering Beckham has been a fan-friendly, fashion-forward ambassador for the sport. The reality is that New York has to do right by its young receiver rather than foster discontent.

So what’s the right way to handle Beckham?

That’s the tough question. It would be unwise for the Giants to either:

1. Let Beckham do and say whatever he wants, unchecked
2. Throw Beckham under the bus

Finding the balancing act falls on the shoulders of Pat Shurmur, a coach with 20 years of NFL experience, who was hired by the Giants in January. The head coach didn’t say much when reporters asked about Beckham, telling them he was “not gonna give the public a pound of flesh” on the subject.

But what really matters is how he handled it behind closed doors:

It didn’t seem to discourage Beckham. He had eight receptions for 131 yards and a touchdown, and he threw a 57-yard touchdown pass too. But his throw was also a reminder that Beckham may be right about some of his criticisms of the Giants’ offense:

So is the fallout from the interview now in the past? Maybe. It’s inspired a mini-beef between Lil Wayne and Eli Manning, but his teammates — namely, Manning — have brushed it off as no big deal.

Maybe the bigger question is whether frustrations will bubble up if the Giants’ offense continues to struggle and the losses keep piling up. Beckham’s 94 receiving yards per game are second all-time behind only Julio Jones, but that number has continued to fall for Beckham since his rookie year.

It’d be nice for the Giants if Beckham quietly went about his business and didn’t say much to the media. But that’s not the player they gave $90 million to. He’s the Giants’ future now — that’s the choice they made — and they have to do what they can to make sure that relationship is positive one.