Joe Judge being tested in unusual ways at start of NY Giants tenure

3. Numerous offseason player arrests

After what we saw out of 2019 first-round draft pick, DeAndre Baker, in his rookie season on and off the field, it was always going to be a miracle to turn him around and get him to play like the first-round pick he was — oh, and the team had to give up other premium picks just to move back up to get him.

However, on the fateful day back in May, that task became borderline impossible as it seemed like Baker wad dead to rights early on. The next series of events is what made and makes this an unusually tough arrest and formal decision to make, especially for a rookie head coach who has been beating the culture drum since he walked through the door.

You can bet the entire locker room has been and will continue to closely monitor his response to this messy situation, as it has gone from looking like Baker was dead guilty, to the case appearing to have a ton of holes in it only to return to dead to rights guilty status after the newest revelations came out.

A situation that would have been difficult enough to deal with if it was a mid-round prospect, this is a first-round draft pick heading into his second year under the GM – but not coach – that gave up a warchest of picks to draft him.

For those reasons, no one has really killed Joe Judge for his handling of the process so far as he’s been as mum on it as anything else relating to the NY Giants (which is a good thing), but fans are going to want to know one way or another whether Baker will be a Giant in the future or not, and they’ll want to know soon, if not having wanted to know already.

Judge has had to balance that whole ‘innocent until proven guilty’ thing with the fact that it looks like the prior college character concerns – which many other teams took him off their NFL draft boards for – that played themselves out in many ways during his rookie year manifested themselves in the worst way possible, with a side of trying to look reasonable to the team while also understanding the longer a head coach keeps a layer that commits a horrific crime guilty on their team leaves the real potential for shame and a stain on the organization; think how the NY Giants handled the Josh Brown situation and how it made them look aroud the NFL, and that was just for an old kicker.

As if that wasn’t messy and awful enough to deal with, kicker Aldrick Rosas decided to go out for a 100 MPH drunk drive that resulted in a T-Bone car crash and by the grace of God didn’t kill or hurt anyone.

While Judge has exercised patience in this one as well, it looks like that may turn out have been the right course of action after Rosas’ official charges didn’t involve alcohol or a felony, even if it was clear to just about everyone he was recklessly drinking and driving – something he’s done before.

With all the damning information seemingly already out in both cases, Joe Judge is faced with the Sophie’s choice of hanging onto players he knows did terrible things but could beat them in court, with the opposite of holding onto them too long and staining his and NY Giants’ reputation as a whole.

Not exactly the type of things and decisions want to be dealing with while already stepping into a tough situation and learning a new job on the fly.