Blue Wire.

Welcome back. This is the Big Blue Banter New York Giants Football Podcast. I'm Dan Schneier.

Join as always my co-host, Nick Falado. According on our late night tonight, Thursday,

it feels almost like the regular season time to be, Nick. We're recording at this hour.

This is usually the hour reserved for a reaction podcast, which I think is some of our most fun content. Maybe not our best because it's not as tactical and it's not film-based. But we've had some really good fun ones last year week, too, when I brought my brother on. I remember that one, both of us drunk at Austin, angry at that stupid penalty that gave them the field goal.

I don't even want to think about that game, but we're recording at night, some of our best content comes in a night. Tonight was going to be different. I mean, like, I had some fun plans. We'll end up doing these, Nick, next week. It's a dead week before the season. I want to do a Giants Breakouts podcast.

I think it's going to be, I'm sorry,

Giants Bold Predictions podcast and the Giants Breakouts Bus Sleepers podcast,

kind of taken from the fantasy world, but just kind of giving our little in-depth takes on this roster. But tonight there's news. There's a lot of freaking news. So we got to get to all that, Nick. So we'll start that in a moment. but first of all how you doing my friend doing well but it was a hectic day on giants twitter man

totally blindsided by the big piece of news that we're about to go over. Yeah, we certainly are. And so let's start right there with the big piece of news. Out of literally nowhere, it seems like at least. Though, if you read like some of what Art Stapleton was reporting, and if you kind of looked at the tea leaves, as in like, why the hell was Blake Martinez on the field against the Jets, Blake Martinez was cut and he was released today, despite the fact that the Giants have, I would say, Nick, we were talking about this for the podcast, I haven't looked at all 32 rosters.

I can't imagine there's a worse looking inside linebacker group across the NFL. It seems just impossible to me that a team could have possibly built out a worse inside linebacker group than Tate Crowder, Micah McFadden, a rookie fifth round pick, and whatever hell else is going to end up playing there, which I don't even want to say yet because I feel like it's so non-confirmed and it's so fluid. And it could even change day to day. There might even be some new dude they bring in. It's like the three, the LB3 or even the LB2 over Micah or something like that. Is Tay even an LB1? To me, Tay's been awful on tape for two straight years. He's had some of the lowest grades pro football focus. I constantly remember him just shooting gaps and missing and picking the wrong gaps over and over and over again. He's not necessarily good in past coverage. He's okay and as a blitzer, I guess. That's his one saving grace. That's your Al B1. It's just crazy to me that this is, they're at the point here with Blake Martinez where they made a decision to cut him, Nick, despite all this at the linebacker position. So that, I guess, was the biggest surprise to me, just what's left at linebacker with that decision. But as we kind of read through these tea leaves and you can go over them now if you want, it starts to feel like there were some reasons maybe we don't know behind this decision. I think so. I think Blake Martinez went to management and said that he would probably

like to be released. I mean, that's, you look at it, okay? I don't know if the whole,

Blake Martinez is not being voted a captain thing factored into this at all. I can't imagine that's a

huge, huge deciding factor.

And Blake Martinez possibly wanting off the team if that is the case. But then he takes the

personal day and missed practice and yesterday's practice comes back today. And like you said,

he played in that Jets game. And I was like, why is this guy coming off the ACL? He's maybe just,

you know, getting back up to speed. And then today we find out that he's released.

And according to ESPN's Jordan Ron on, it was mutual release.

I think maybe, Dan, he just looked at this situation and said,

Wink Martindale doesn't typically allocate a lot of snaps to one specific linebacker.

Last year, Patrick Queen, he did play 17 games and he played over 800 snaps.

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