The Giants are reportedly mad they didn’t land Matt Patricia

While the Detroit Lions continue to patiently wait for Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia to become available so that they can make him their next head coach, let’s check in on things in New York.

The Giants were supposedly big players in the Matt Patricia sweepstakes, but eventually they landed on Vikings offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur. Though that hire has yet to be officially announced, it is expected to come shortly now that Minnesota is out of the playoffs.

But let’s go back a couple weeks when it appeared the Giants were suddenly front-runners to land Patricia. Several sources inside the New York media suggested that Patricia was the Giants’ favorite candidate, and MMQB’s Peter King reported that Patricia actually preferred the New York job to Detroit.

So what the hell happened? Well, according to Gary Myers of the New York Daily News, only part of those rumors appeared to be true. Patricia was, indeed, the Giants’ favorite candidate per Myers, but they couldn’t land Patricia, and apparently they weren’t too happy with the defensive coordinator’s choice to coach in Detroit:

Just a few days after it got out that Patricia was taking the Detroit job, a source called to confirm what the Daily News reported: Patricia indeed was the Giants’ first choice and the source added that there was discontent in the organization that it didn’t go their way.

So if Myers’ account of the events is accurate, that means that not only did the Lions get their guy, but their guy chose actually chose them, too.

Myers postulates why Patricia may have chosen Detroit over New York, and none of the rationales are all that surprising. There’s obviously Patricia’s familiarity with general manager Bob Quinn, there’s the perceived dysfunction within the Giants considering the debacle that was 2017 and there’s the tough decision on what to do with Eli Manning.

We may never know why Patricia chose Detroit over New York, but it’s always good to hear that Detroit won out on a much-desired candidate, and in the process got a bunch of people in the Giants organization mad.