This couldn’t have surprised you at all, not if you are even remotely familiar with the Mara half of the Giants’ ownership. It is one thing to fire another coach, although the regularity with which that has become a staple of Giants life also must be troubling.
The Maras have a long-standing personal, professional and familial relationship with the Rooney family, after all, and the Steelers have had three coaches since 1969. That is the model. That is the ideal. Stability has always been what the Giants sought. You don’t do that by blowing up blueprints every few years.
So there was no way the Giants were going to press the ejector button on both the coach and the GM. Truthfully, I suspect if you slipped a little truth serum into John Mara’s morning coffee on Monday, he would’ve admitted that he’d have preferred to give the Dave Gettleman/Pat Shurmur partnership another year. Four coaches in four years is not the Mara way; remember, Wellington Mara once gave Allie Sherman a 10-year extension after a 2-10-2 season. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
But John Mara exists in an entirely different world than his father did, and in that world there was no way he could look season-ticket-holders in the eye on Monday morning and sell the status quo. Just as telling, there was no way he could continue selling that to Steve Tisch, representing the other 50 percent of the Giants’ owner’s suite.
So Shurmur goes, and Gettleman stays, and now the clock officially begins to tick for the GM, who has shown a propensity for three things in his two years on the job at 1925 Giants Drive:
1. Defiantly doing things his way
2. Defiantly refusing to discuss those things regularly in a public forum
3. Trying to come off as a folksy football guy when he does deign to open up, only to come across as a guy in a New York job with a disconcerting New England accent
Now, none of those things ought to preclude him from doing what he was hired to do. Even in a sporting time when the clock has been sped up to double-time in terms of patience and performance, two years is an eye blink. Unless ownership was completely convinced he was driving the car backward, this was a defendable thing to do.
Which shines the spotlight on two things.
First, Gettleman. Look, the fact that the Giants have already wasted two years of Saquon Barkley’s prime supplies all necessary evidence why there was such a compelling argument against making him Gettleman’s first signature acquisition. His free agent decisions have been dubious. The trade for Leonard Williams looms as an unfixable fiasco. But he has drafted well. He has a franchise quarterback in place. He has money to spend.
Now, he has to get results. Hey, even the sainted George Young needed three years to finally break the chains of a generation of losing — and there were a few follow-up years of regression before the Giants truly became the Giants. Young, of course, never had to deal with Twitter or with 30-minute news cycles; Young also never sold himself as the smartest guy in every room he stood in. Both realities allowed him time Gettleman will never have. There is no more buffer.
Hell, even John Mara said Monday, “He needs a higher batting average.”
Relatively speaking, that’s George Steinbrenner in 1978 or so saying, “Billy needs to win 160 games.”
There is another intriguing development from Monday. Both Mara and Tisch insist their working relationship is good, that the notion there is a rift between them is false. OK. Fair enough. And it certainly seems that Mara cast himself against type by agreeing to blow up another coach — and that almost certainly can be read as him respecting Tisch’s wishes to shake the Giants up from their malaise.
“I’d like to become more involved and I will be more involved,” Tisch said Monday.
This represents a tectonic change. If John learned much from his father’s successes, after all, we must believe he learned even more from Wellington’s greatest failure, which was allowing his internal squabbling with his nephew and co-owner, Tim, drag the Giants into the dust by 1979. That civil war nearly destroyed the franchise.
So far, there is no sign that history is about to repeat. The partners are still partners and appeared on the same page Monday. Will they stay there? That, as much anything, may determine if the Giants ever find their way again, and how long it’ll take to get there.