New York Giants general manager Jerry Reese held a conference call Thursday to wrap up what was a Super Bowl winning season for his team, and to begin looking forward to the 2012 NFL season. Below are some of the excerpts from Reese's conference call.
Q: Is that the biggest challenge you face during the offseason? Are you expecting a line to form at the door for people looking for more money?
A: That’s a good problem to have. You win the Super Bowl and if everybody thinks they’re the reason we won – that’s a good problem to have. That means you won it. It’s just part of the offseason. There are always contract issues in the offseason. That’s what the offseason is. You have to deal with contracts and things with your roster – who’s going to stay, who’s going to go. Again, we’re in the very early stages of the evaluation process. The coaches are evaluating the players from their perspective. Our personnel staff, we’re evaluating our players from our perspective. Obviously we’re looking at the UFAs and RFAs from the other teams, along with starting our draft meetings, our pre-draft meetings before we go to the combine in a couple of weeks.
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Q: How far behind the other teams do you feel you are?
A: We’ve obviously been working as we went along through the playoffs, but it’s a lot different when you’re still playing than when you have nothing else to do except concentrate on what you’re trying to do in the offseason. We’re a little bit behind. Again, like you said, it’s a good problem to have. But we can catch up quickly. We’ve done it before. We have a tremendous staff with Dave Gettleman in the Pro [Personnel] Department, Marc Ross in the College [Scouting] Department. Those guys are real pros and we can catch up pretty quickly.
Q: Was there anything during the season that said to yourself, ‘We’re doing things the right way’?
A: We always try to do what’s right for the New York Giants. We try to make good football decisions. It would be great to look like you’re really smart in the offseason and go out and make a lot of splashy moves so you guys can write nice-going things about our personnel staff, but our goal is to make good football decisions and that’s what we try to do every year. We don’t just think about our personnel for the current year. We think a couple of years down the line and that’s important. I think fans think about the here and now, what our team looks like now. We think about that as well, obviously, because you want to win every year, but we definitely think a couple of years down the road a little bit in respect to personnel.
Q: Do you look at the team more as 9-7 or as a 6-0, Super Bowl team?
A: It doesn’t matter how you look at it. The result at the end is really what matters the most. We were able to get hot at the right time. At times we didn’t play very well, but we played well at the right times. It’s not like we played against Jefferson Township High School. We played against some good players in the tournament. We earned the right to be World Champs. I look at it like that way.