‘It was just the wrong city’: Inside Geno Smith’s one-game stint as Eli Manning’s replacement

Stephen A. Smith explains why the New York Giants have been a nice surprise this NFL season. (2:11)

ON THE MORNING of Dec. 3, 2017, Geno Smith took the field as the starting quarterback for the New York Giants. He was greeted by Giants fans who had made the 3,000-mile trip to the Oakland Coliseum.

“That’s my quarterback! That’s my quarterback!” they screamed. Except they weren’t talking about Smith.

Giants fans, dressed in their No. 10 Eli Manning jerseys, had “Fire McAdoo” signs. They wanted head coach Ben McAdoo out. The final straw was McAdoo’s decision to have Smith, notorious in New York thanks to his tumultuous tenure with the Jets, start on that sunny, late fall afternoon in place of Manning.

“It was wild. [Down] to the smell. To the noise. It was nuts,” said Sterling Shepard, then a second-year wide receiver with the Giants.

New York was a team tearing apart at the seams just months after what stands as its only playoff appearance of the last decade. The Giants were 2-9 and now going to bench their two-time Super Bowl champion quarterback not for the heir apparent in Davis Webb, but for Smith.

According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation, McAdoo told Manning at the beginning of the week that he wanted him to start but would probably turn to Smith at some point in part because of a struggling offensive line facing Oakland’s fierce pass rush of Khalil Mack and Bruce Irvin.

Manning, who had topped 225 passing yards just once and been sacked 14 times in his previous seven starts, said if he didn’t know he was going to finish the game, he didn’t want to play. It wouldn’t be fair to Smith to come off the bench after not playing a full game in two-plus years.

This was Smith’s first and only start with the Giants. The 24-17 loss — during which Smith threw for 202 yards and a touchdown with two lost fumbles — was tainted by the dysfunction of the organization.

“I remember [Smith] being really pissed in the locker room afterwards. You can really tell [that game] meant a lot to him,” former vice president of player evaluation Marc Ross said. “I do remember that specifically. The whole situation was just f—ed up. There was so much dysfunction going on then. There was no easy way to move on from [Manning]. It was just messed up.”

The next day, McAdoo and Giants GM Jerry Reese were fired. Manning was reinstated as the starting quarterback, and Smith went back to the bench.

“[Smith] handled it well,” Manning told ESPN in a phone conversation this week. “Went in there, discussed it, talked about it, and he dealt with it like a pro. Just went with it.”

It would be almost four full years until Smith got another chance to start.

Now, 1,792 days later, playing the best football of his professional career with the Seattle Seahawks, Smith will face his former team for the first time as a starter.

“It was just a chance for me to go out there and show what I got,” Smith said Thursday. “It was one game. Obviously there was a lot of speculation and stuff surrounding that game, but for me, like I’ve always been, I was just focused on the game. I didn’t really get caught up in anything else.”
http://www.espn.com/espn/rss/news