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Inside NY Giants’ decade of despair: How they got here, and this regime’s fight to survive

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Inside NY Giants’ decade of despair: How they got here, and this regime’s fight to survive

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The New York Giants were stumbling through another losing season back in 1978 when they had to endure the embarrassment of a play that would live in franchise infamy.

A bobbled handoff by quarterback Joe Pisarcik that Herman Edwards of the Philadelphia Eagles recovered and turned into a 26-yard return for a touchdown and a devastating 19-17 defeat. With only 31 seconds remaining, the Giants ahead on the scoreboard and the Eagles having used all their timeouts, all Pisarcik had to do was fall on the ball and kill the clock for victory.

Instead, The Miracle of the Meadowlands happened.

That was the breaking point for a group of nearly 100 Giants fans that dubbed themselves “The Giants Fans Committee,” and they were determined to make a statement.

Three weeks after the Pisarcik fumble, those 95 members of the Giants Fans Committee gathered inside a banquet room at the Ramada Inn in Clifton, New Jersey, a meeting place inside a hotel in the shadow of the Meadowlands.

A fee of $3 each paid for the room rental as well as coffee, orange juice and pastries.

It was there that the committee also took up a collection to pay for a small plane that carried a banner over the old Giants Stadium at the game later that day. The message, in the third quarter of an eventual win over the St. Louis Cardinals, read: “15 Years of Lousy Football … We’ve Had Enough.”

In the aftermath, the Giants were coerced by the league to hire George Young as general manager. They eventually promoted defensive coordinator Bill Parcells to be their head coach. Young and Parcells, both enshrined in Canton as members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, would lead the Giants out of the darkness and to a pair of Super Bowl wins over the next decade-plus.

So how did these Giants get anywhere close to those times of despair from the 1970s again?

To appreciate how far the Giants have fallen, let’s press the rewind button and trace the organizational missteps with ownership yet again facing questions about starting over and whether general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll deserve a fourth year to get this program going in the right direction.

The Giants are 2-10 and winless at home in five tries heading into Sunday’s game against the New Orleans Saints at MetLife Stadium. You have to go back to when this current slide began during the 2015 season to truly get the complete picture, as the Giants have suffered through eight campaigns of double-digit losses since.

Tom Coughlin knew his defense was going to have its personnel problems that year, even with Steve Spagnuolo back as defensive coordinator, so he would have to compensate with decisions on offense that, quite frankly, were out of character.

There was immense frustration. The writing was on the wall. The magic of those Super Bowl runs was gone.

Coughlin’s final team was set up to fail, even if the motivation from the Giants was unintentional.

The 6-10 slog served as the final season of his coaching career, and the entire time, Coughlin was fighting to restore Giants pride with one arm tied behind his back.

The Giants’ $200 million defense

Coughlin exited, but Jerry Reese remained as general manager. Ben McAdoo, Coughlin’s OC for two years, was hired as head coach and Reese poured resources into the side of the ball that sunk Coughlin. The defense was no longer going to be the albatross it was the year before thanks to a $200 million splurge.

Olivier Vernon. Snacks Harrison. Janoris Jenkins. Keenan Robinson.

The free-agent additions were significant upgrades and changed the look of a defense that led the way in McAdoo’s first year to an 11-5 record and a playoff berth.

There were signs at the end that things were not as promising as they may have appeared when everything came crashing down in Green Bay: the infamous boat trip, Odell Beckham Jr. punching a hole in the wall outside the visitors’ locker room at Lambeau Field and the notion that Eli Manning was on the back nine of his career – words uttered directly by Reese himself in the postseason news conference.

Maybe we should have seen what happened next coming.

Ben McAdoo and the crumbling Giants locker room

Long before John Mara issued his playful yet prophetic “From Bono to Bozo” warning on Daboll about how things can change quickly for coaches and teams, especially in the Big Apple, there was what transpired with McAdoo.

Year 2 began with McAdoo, now with slicked-back hair, sharing a Rudyard Kipling poem and a fable about “Frasier the Lion” in team meetings in training camp and things just got stranger as the year progressed.

The defense that led the playoff run the year before started splintering quickly. Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Landon Collins had their issues with Eli Apple. DRC was suspended for a week when he left the facility during practice.

Apple and “Jackrabbit” Jenkins did not return from the bye week on time, and in trying to protect the team, McAdoo twisted the truth publicly on several occasions.

Then, of course, came the coup de grace with the bungled benching of Eli Manning.

A week later, McAdoo and Reese were gone, Manning was back as the starter and the Giants turned toward yet another new chapter when Dave Gettleman was hired as GM before the season was over.

Pat Shurmur, the ‘Adult in the room’

Pat Shurmur was given the job to succeed McAdoo for two big reasons. He was supposed to be a calming influence as opposed to McAdoo within a locker room that finished the 2017 season engulfed in chaos.

“The adult in the room,” is how Gettleman described Shurmur, who viewed his opportunity with Big Blue as a second chance after failing as a head coach in Cleveland.

There was also the influence Shurmur would ultimately have in picking the next quarterback after one season with Manning back as starter.

Shurmur and Mara were enamored with Josh Allen. Others in the front office had good things to say on Sam Darnold.

But ultimately, Gettleman convinced all involved that the best player in the draft was the running back from Penn State, and that they could get another year out of Manning, and Saquon Barkley would be their golden ticket to an offensive resurgence.

Farewell Odell Beckham Jr., hello Daniel Jones

The Giants had been eyeing Justin Herbert since 2018, but when he went back to Oregon the following year, they pivoted. Gettleman shipped Odell Beckham Jr. to Cleveland heading into Shurmur’s second season, angering a generation of fans whose only positive Giants memories were attached to the accomplishments of No. 13.

Barkley became the face of the franchise and, under the premise that they had to draft a quarterback, no matter what, Gettleman fell in love with Daniel Jones at the Senior Bowl and that was that. Shurmur believed in Jones, too, and seemed poised to be the one to guide him as they moved forward together.

But after finishing 4-12, the Giants fired Shurmur yet kept Gettleman, setting themselves up for more heartache and disappointment. Gettleman alienated many with his approach to team building. Scouts that sat in the room believed the GM was going to do what he wanted to do, regardless of input. That feeling only increased in the next regime.

Joe Judge and the great divide

Joe Judge was hired to be the “CEO head coach,” someone who could dip into every facet of the game while delegating responsibilities. That started out as a novel concept that could work, but everything that followed offered up unforeseen and nearly impossible to overcome challenges, especially for a first-time head coach at any level.

There was the COVID-19 pandemic and its ramifications. For example, Judge’s two teams never had an indoor weight room and the players never met with their position coaches in position meeting rooms.

By Year 2, the Giants’ expectations were higher than they should have been coming off a 6-win season. The fact that they had beaten the Cowboys on the final day of the regular season and had a chance at winning a division title – believe it or not – before the Eagles tanked the fourth quarter of a game against Washington set an optimistic tone.

The issue with Judge became this: his working (and personal) relationship with Gettleman was completely dysfunctional that second season. It was as if they were operating for two different teams, and by the end, Judge let his disgust and frustration with Gettleman affect how he coached the team.

He believed that by exposing the mistakes Gettleman made – and very publicly, with the backup QB spot – that ownership would see it his way. Outside of the organization, Gettleman was no longer as diligent in scouting players, becoming more obvious which way this was headed. It was as if he was going through the motions, and Judge set out on a path believing he had to do it all, or at least try, and nothing went right.

What Judge did was sabotage his chances at sticking around because the outside observers did not see his moves for what they were. That was the underlying situation with Judge as that season came to a close. He thought he was fighting for his job; others viewed it as paranoia and just plain weird.

The Giants had a GM with no regard for anything but his opinions, and a head coach who had so much conviction in how he did the job, he ran victory formation from his own goal line to prove a point about that GM, their non-existent relationship and the QBs he forced him to play with.

And when Judge became a punchline league-wide, it made it impossible to keep him as HC when they had to hire a new GM as well upon Gettleman’s “retirement.”

The aftermath: Where the Giants go from here

The Giants are 50-92-1 since Coughlin’s departure following the 2015 season. They have hired and fired three head coaches in his wake: McAdoo, Shurmur and Judge with an interim tag for Spagnuolo for four games after McAdoo was dismissed in 2017.

The Giants have put themselves in this position, and that started well before Daboll and Schoen got here. They inherited one of the most challenging jobs in the NFL at the time. Suggesting otherwise is being disingenuous.

Schoen and Daboll have made mistakes. They came here as a first-time GM and HC duo that, by most accounts, were at the top of the market with plenty of suitors. They were in lock step about building a foundation and then sustaining success, and there is plenty of reason to believe they still are.

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Daboll went out and squeezed every ounce of what many expected to be a four-win team in 2022, completely altering Schoen’s plan for that offseason when we all know they had their sights set on one of the quarterbacks.

So Schoen pivoted, and admittedly, in some ways, he regrets that decision. But he backed his coach, he backed ownership’s emotional high and did his job by trying to thread the needle and find a way to bring back the quarterback, Daniel Jones, and the running back, Saquon Barkley, who led that surprising run to the playoffs, including the first playoff win since Super Bowl XLVI.

As Schoen acknowledged last month: “You come off a winning season, some of the issues were maybe masked or you’re blinded a little bit by it because of the success.”

The Giants are not blind to where they are now despite what they may say publicly about how close they are.

They need a quarterback, and those who dismiss that being a distinct game changer in terms of how a franchise flourishes or flounders are kidding themselves. The 2024 draft class has produced potential cornerstones and building blocks from Malik Nabers, Tyrone Tracy Jr. and Theo Johnson on offense to Tyler Nubin and Dru Phillips on defense.

Too much attention was paid to need in Schoen’s first two drafts as he set out to establish his own personnel and scouting departments, and the results have been hit and miss. A foundation that needed to be rebuilt still has areas to address in order for this team to turn the corner. Another strong offseason in combination with the continued development of younger players on the roster, and those close games that are being lost might be swung in their favor.

It’s a leap of faith yet again for ownership, and while Mara offered a vote of confidence last month, these last five games could paint a different picture of how this all is looked upon.

Have Schoen and Daboll shown some semblance of competency and a plan, and a willingness to work together? Yes, and with the perspective of where the Giants were in 2021 after where they were in 2019 and in 2017 and in 2015, the thought of giving this regime the length of a standard four-year rookie contract is not too much of an ask.

That might be the only way to prevent the Giants’ regrettable history over the past decade from repeating itself once again.

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