Editor's note: The Giants on Monday fired coach Ben McAdoo and general manager Jerry Reese.

If you're a Giants fan who thought this season couldn't get any more depressing after the 2-9 record and the injury to Odell Beckham Jr., coach Ben McAdoo and general manager Jerry Reese sure managed to surprise you on Tuesday afternoon. After 14 years and 222 total starts under center for the Giants, Eli Manning was publicly benched in about as unceremonious of a fashion as anyone could have imagined.

The decision was almost universally derided for a number of reasons. Eli is a franchise icon. He was dumped via news release by an unpopular front office, who is benching him for Jets castoff Geno Smith. I would say the Giants might as well have called the news into WFAN themselves, but I suspect sports talk radio would have thought Jerry in East Rutherford was making a prank call.

Let's try to take a step backward, remove at least some of the emotion from the decision, and analyze it on its merits. There's some logic underlying the Giants' choice, although it's tortured and surrounded by a breathtaking amount of naiveté and/or stupidity. And then, let's start thinking about what's next for the two-time Super Bowl champion whom the Giants just made the most expensive clipboard holder in football.

Should the Giants have benched Manning?

It depends. If their goal was to field the most competitive team possible in 2017, they absolutely should not have benched Eli. There's virtually no reason to think that Smith or rookie third-rounder Davis Webb give the Giants a better chance of winning any of their five remaining games this season. You might argue that a new quarterback could shock some life back into this team, but when the patient already is dead, all the jolts in the world aren't going to make a difference.

The Giants are benching Manning, by their own words, to evaluate the other quarterbacks they have on their roster. They expect to play both Smith and Webb by the end of the season. It's totally reasonable to want a look at the other quarterbacks on their roster given the fact that they're 2-9 and likely about to enter a rebuild with a starting quarterback who will turn 37 in January.

Why on earth would anybody need to evaluate Smith at this point?

Realistically, I don't think the Giants are making this move to get a serious look at Smith, who was one of the league's worst quarterbacks with the Jets and was signed as a last-gasp veteran stopgap. Smith is a free agent after the season, and if the Giants really thought he had any shot at being their starting quarterback in 2018, they would sign him to an extension locking in an unguaranteed base salary for next year.

The Giants really want to evaluate Webb, who hasn't attempted an NFL pass. The time frame doesn't make much sense, given that Webb was a big-armed project coming out of the draft with serious accuracy and decision-making issues who was expected to possibly take over for Manning two or three years after being selected. It's difficult to believe he's going to show enough as a rookie to keep the Giants from adding a quarterback this offseason. It also wouldn't be fair, given Webb's expected timeline, to disqualify him after a few games behind a terrible offensive line with a bunch of backup wide receivers. But here we are.

The most reasonable explanation for going to Smith and not Webb right now is practice time. The Giants probably want to get Webb meaningful reps with the first-team offense before turning him to the wolves on Sunday. Nathan Peterman's disastrous debut with the Bills is the worst-case scenario of what can happen when an inexperienced quarterback is thrown onto the field without real practice time.

It seems likely that the two quarterbacks will split time with the first team in practice before Webb takes over as the starter as soon as Week 14. The Giants probably figure that it's better for Webb to make his debut at home against the Cowboys, but I'm not so sure they'll be doing Webb any favors there given the fan sentiment toward this decision.

Eli Manning is 8-4 in the playoffs in his career, including two Super Bowl titles in the 2007 and 2011 seasons. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Should Eli have been amenable to the plan the Giants proposed?

Absolutely not. It's ludicrous. ESPN's Dan Graziano reported on Tuesday night that the Giants pitched Manning on a plan to which nobody in their right mind would agree. Under the aegis of keeping Manning's consecutive start streak alive while creating evaluation opportunities, the Giants were planning to play Eli during the first half of games before taking him out by design at halftime for Smith or Webb.

Manning reacted to this plan as phony, and it's difficult to disagree. It reeks of stat-padding and would have painted Eli as a player more concerned with his own legacy than with the Giants' organizational plan. I also can't think of a team in recent history that rotated their quarterbacks on a half-by-half basis, let alone did so by choice. The Giants must have known Manning would reject their idea. The only question is whether they believed, if even for a second, that they would look like the good guys and justified for benching Manning when the report of the plan came out.

Is there a way the Giants could have done this without causing a self-inflicted PR disaster?

Maybe not, but I can certainly think of a better way to go about it. The Giants should have prepared for this possibility before this week. Once it was clear that they were dealing with a lost season -- starting 0-5 and losing Beckham probably should have been enough to tip them off -- they should have started getting Webb ready for a late-season cameo.

How does that work? You start giving him reps in practice with the first team weeks before he's ready to come in. Chalk it up to maintenance or wanting to keep Manning's arm fresh. Once you get to this point, when you know that you're going to move on from Manning next year, tell him what's going on privately before holding a news conference. Announce that you're going to evaluate Webb over the final three weeks of the season. Make the Giants-Cowboys game Eli Manning Appreciation Day and confirm that it's going to be his last start in a Giants uniform. Treat it like a graduation as opposed to a funeral.

There's still going to be outrage under that scenario, but at least you're doing right by Manning and letting him get his moment in front of the fan base. Doing it the Giants' way has just ensured that the fans are going to chant Eli's name during the second half of every home game the rest of the way unless Webb looks like Aaron Rodgers.

Rookie tight end Evan Engram leads the Giants in targets this season (85). Danny Wild-USA TODAY Sports

Why didn't the Giants make this move before the trade deadline?

Great question. The Giants were 1-6 and coming off their bye when the trade deadline struck on Oct. 31. The ESPN Football Power Index gave Big Blue just a 0.5 percent chance of making the postseason at that point, but I wonder if Reese still realistically thought the Giants had a shot at turning things around and running the table. I wouldn't say that idea is rational, but NFL front offices aren't always operated under any pretense of rationality. The 2013 Giants didn't make the playoffs, but they responded to their 0-6 start by going 7-3 over their final 10 games.

The Giants could have financially made an Eli trade work under the salary cap, but there wouldn't have been many suitors with the cap space and a need at quarterback. The Texans might have been able to piece together the cap room, but they lost Deshaun Watson for the season two days after the trade deadline. Manning might not have wanted to go to the Bills. The only obvious candidate would have been the Jaguars, and given the bad blood between Tom Coughlin and the Giants organization after Reese fired his longtime coach in January 2016, it's difficult to imagine the two teaming up on a trade for Coughlin's longtime starter. More on that in a bit.

So then the Giants are tanking, right?

They could be, although they were already in great shape to finish with one of the top picks in the 2018 draft. Big Blue already had a 77.7 percent shot of ending up with a top-five pick even before benching Manning, and while the combination of Smith and Webb should be worse, it's tough to imagine them falling much further than they already have.

Specifically, there's very little chance of the Giants tanking their way to the first overall pick in next year's draft. The 49ers would need to win one game and the 0-11 Browns would need to somehow get two victories in their final five contests to force a tie at 2-14, which the Giants would likely win on the strength of schedule tiebreaker. And that's assuming the Giants don't somehow back into a win by accident.

This might move the Giants up a draft spot or two, but it doesn't suddenly shoot them into the top of the draft order. Given that the Browns are almost certainly going to draft a quarterback with the first overall pick, it seems ill-advised to tank for the second-best quarterback in the draft.