The fact that hiring John Harbaugh as head coach meant the Giants would be required to change their front office structure was no small story. In fact, it was such a big factor that it was part of the reason for a multi-day delay between when the team announced its intentions to hire Harbaugh and when the deal was finalized. We’d only really gotten small tidbits about how different the structure would be, but Ian O’Connor of The Athletic dropped a few key details this evening that certainly show significant potential change. 
Before O’Connor’s report today, the tidbits that we’d gotten were minor. Harbaugh wanted to have roster input. Harbaugh would report directly to owner John Mara and not general manager Joe Schoen. It was a similar situation to what Harbaugh had grown accustomed to in Baltimore and didn’t seem to be shaking up the boat too much. Schoen wanted to be sure Harbaugh wouldn’t be importing front office staffers to slowly take control of a front office that had been Schoen’s domain.
That appears to still be mostly the case, but there was one hire of Harbaugh’s that appears to be mixing things up. Per O’Connor, Harbaugh was pivotal in the team’s efforts to hire Dawn Aponte away from the league office. Aponte’s position with New York has been designated as senior vice president of football operations and strategy. According to Pat Leonard of NY Daily News Sports, she will be responsible for “strategic planning for football operations, analytics, salary cap management, player contract negotiations, compliance, and working closely with the college and pro personnel departments.”
That’s not all Leonard says. If it seems like several of those responsibilities would usually reside with the general manager, it’s because they would. Per Leonard, Schoen has essentially been “relegated to handling scouting” and the “rest of the building reports to Dawn.” In addition, both O’Connor and Leonard report that Aponte will report to Harbaugh, so it is beginning to look as if Harbaugh is encroaching quite a bit more than initially understood on the duties of the general manager.
O’Connor’s report doesn’t pose the situation as nearly as much of a takeover as Leonard is painting it out to be, though. He includes quotes from Harbaugh on how impressed he’s been with Schoen and how well they are working together as they both work on building the team’s new staff and future roster. But, if what Leonard claims is true, it’s hard not to believe that Schoen is getting quietly pushed into a corner. The Giants paid a lot of money and agreed to a lot of concessions in order to bring Harbaugh in to lead their team. Time will tell how each new change will affect the team’s future success.
On the one hand, it sounds a lot like Harbaugh handpicking Aponte to usurp Schoen and it wouldn’t be shocking to see him ousted after this year. The way front office turnover and draft preparation work with the calendar, it’s very normal for even totally new front office leadership to take most of a year to change people over anyway. On the other hand, Schoen has done a pretty good job in the draft recently, and most people saw Paton being gone soon after Payton arrived in Denver (still confusing name-wise) and they seem to be symbiotic enough, so you never know for sure.