It really would be easy if there were a magic formula, or even if there were a reliable blueprint to follow. But there isn’t. You hire a coach or a manager — any sport, any time — and what you’re really trying to do is draw to an inside straight.
You buy your card. And then you wait. And you hope.
It’s easy to say the Jets should hire an experienced coach (I know how easy it is, because I wrote that, and I feel that). The Jets won a Super Bowl with Weeb Ewbank, who had previously won two NFL titles in Baltimore. They went to an AFC title game under Bill Parcells, who had previously won two Super Bowls with the Giants.
Of course, they also went to AFC title games under Walt Michaels and Rex Ryan, both of whom were first-time head coaches when the Jets hired them.
So which works?
Well, in the moment, they all worked, right? (Well, except maybe for Michaels, since the Mud Bowl AFC Championship wound up being the last game he ever coached in the NFL).
And, of course, it brings up the interesting case of Parcells, who became something of a coaching whisperer in New England, and with the Jets, and in Dallas, because he brought a fresh wave of his signature magic with him. Which is all wonderful. And which is all true. And yet there is this reality:
Bill Parcells’ greatest success of his career came when he was coaching the Giants.
And he was a first-time NFL coach when the Giants hired him for the job in 1983.
So which works?
Nobody has ever been more burned by making the right decision with the wrong guy than the Giants, of course, who famously had Tom Landry coaching the defense and Vince Lombardi coaching the offense under Jim Lee Howell in the late ’50s, saw Lombardi leave for Green Bay and Landry for Dallas (and one-way tickets to Canton), watched Howell retire not long after, then gave the job to first-timer Allie Sherman. But not before asking Lombardi to change course after a year in Wisconsin, which Lombardi couldn’t bring himself to do.
Sherman worked out for a while — three NFL title games in his first three years — until he didn’t. Until the players Lombardi saw already growing old (a big reason why he stayed put) actually grew old, and that was it for him.
So which works?
You’d like to think the Yankees, who have won more championships than any team extant, would offer an insight into which way is best — except the Yankees have won pennants with managers who had worked elsewhere (Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, Bucky Harris, Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, Bob Lemon, Joe Torre, Joe Girardi) and have also won them with first-timers (Ralph Houk, Yogi Berra).
And even if you hire a coach with experience, how much does that experience matter? There is no more sainted head coach in our city than Red Holzman, who won 613 games with the Knicks and won two championships and taught generations of New York kids that the right way to play basketball was to hit the open man.
Yet on the day he was hired at age 47, two days after Christmas 1967 (as a stopgap place-holder, it was believed), Holzman’s record as a head coach was 83-120. It wasn’t as if it caused the back pages to faint; they barely noticed.
(Twenty-four years later, when the Knicks went the same path with an experienced fellow named Riley, they noticed plenty.)
So, which works?
Well, in a hot-take world, this will no doubt freeze the polar caps. But the only answer is this:
Check back in three years.
Vac’s Whacks
You know, at some point with the Nets it stops being a tribute to the laws of probability correcting themselves and instead becomes a matter of them being a good, solid, tough basketball team.
I really like Joe Benigno, but I am increasingly worried that if the Jets go a certain way with their coaching search, we may have the first spontaneous human combustion in radio history.
Dick Vitale has a new book out commemorating his 40th year in TV, “Mount Rushmores of College Basketball,” and it’s a fun read well worth your time anyway.
But every penny of the proceeds go to the V Foundation for pediatric cancer research, which makes it an even more laudable project.
Two of my old colleagues from The Star-Ledger in Newark, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, have a book coming out this week, “The Sopranos Sessions,” on the 20th anniversary of the show’s debut, and I’d like to remind you that the first scene was Tony retrieving our old newspaper from the driveway. Just in case you were to question their cred. Which you do at your own risk.
Whack Back at Vac
Frank Giordano: Just one question to the Giants management, the New York media and the fans. Bring back Eli? Really?
Vac: I reiterate something I first said in this space four months ago: Somehow Eli Manning has become the most polarizing New York athlete since Alex Rodriguez.
Dave Ornauer: Thank you for taking me back to my childhood and the magical year of 1969. What a summer. Woodstock, the Mets, men landing on the moon — even the underdog mayoral campaign that John Lindsey staged and won! Largely riding the coat tails of those Mets.
Vac: One of the best parts of sports, though, is believing — currently against all odds — that we really will get another year like that. Sometime.
@joeyvags: This might be Kevin Willard’s best job yet at Seton Hall. Absent of his big 4 class of last year’s seniors, this team knows its roles and plays within the scheme and very good defense.
@MikeVacc: The biggest shame of last Saturday’s refereeing fiasco is that it likely cost St. John’s the game. The second-biggest, by a whisker, is that it puts an asterisk next to Seton Hall’s record in some minds. Whether they won or lost that game, they are legit.
Tom Cooney: As arduous a task as it has been watching these Knicks to see how many of the young players actually have a future, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: David Fizdale, with his stylish glasses, his metaphoric axe, his sideline exuberance and histrionics and overall pleasant personality, is not a very good basketball coach.
Vac: Quite a few of my loyal Knicks correspondents have already come to that conclusion, but I’ll say this: I am willing to wait to see what he can do with a roster that wasn’t designed to tank.