Look, it’s possible the Giants could’ve stepped in a deep pile of pixie dust here, and found themselves the next NFL mastermind in Joe Judge. All you need to do is look back at the Giants’ own history to see how wild a crapshoot finding the Right Guy can be.
The 1958 Giants had Tom Landry to run the defense and Vince Lombardi to run the offense. Somehow, they let both get away and allowed Lombardi’s Packers to dominate the 1960s and Landry’s Cowboys to define the 1970s while the Giants went into witness protection. Crazy stuff happens.
The 1983 Giants went 3-12-1 under a first-year coach named Parcells, who would have been as good as gone if George Young had been able to get Howard Schnellenberger’s signature on a contract. Schnellenberger coached 22 more years at various coaching outposts and won double digits twice — the same number of Super Bowls Bill Parcells won over the next seven years.
Crazy stuff happens.
So the Giants’ brass may well have pulled a four-leaf clover out of the dust Tuesday morning, picking the Patriots’ 38-year-old wide receivers coach and special-teams coordinator to succeed Pat Shurmur. Really, what William Goldman wrote about Hollywood so many years ago applies every bit as much to the hiring of football coaches: “Nobody knows anything.”
But it is difficult not to come away from this odd coaching search with another level of concern regarding the men who run the Giants, who have adopted as their credo the modern-sports gospel of “collaboration” yet only collaborated to turn this coaching search into a muddled mess.
The NFL on the field in 2020 is a fast-moving, fast-paced game that rewards aggression. The Giants insist that nothing about the Week 17 loss to the Eagles would have spared Shurmur’s job, and yet rather than announce the inevitable — GM staying, coach going — when they came to that conclusion, they waited until the day after.
Now, maybe that wouldn’t have made a difference with a candidate like, say, Ron Rivera, whom they never really had time to get excited about because the Redskins snapped him up right on Black Monday. But when asked by Michael Kay on his radio program if there might have been interest in reuniting with Rivera — with whom Gettleman worked in Carolina — the Giants GM said this: “I really don’t know that. I just know before we could turn around, the deal was done.”
Since it was radio, it’s hard to call that “bad optics,” but it certainly provided a troubling characterization of the organization being a step slow.
The past 48 hours only hammered that point home. By every indication, the Giants saw Baylor’s Matt Rhule as their clear-cut choice, and there was a lot to feel good about: He has turned around two moribund college teams (Temple, Baylor), he was born in New York City, he worked for the Giants as an assistant offensive line coach and he was given high grades by the players he worked with.
Baylor’s season ended with a 26-14 loss to Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day. Rhule then went on vacation to Mexico. Presumably, the Giants were ready to pounce, since the overwhelming belief was that they weren’t going to let him leave 1925 Giants Drive without making a serious offer once his interview, scheduled for Tuesday, took place.
All well. All good. Here’s the thing: If they were that sure about Rhule, why not take the game to him? Why not go to Mexico? Why not be waiting for him when he returned home to Waco, Texas? Now look: It’s possible, likely even, that Rhule already knew that David Tepper, the hedge-fund guy who owns the Panthers, was prepared to offer seven years and $62 million (with a chance to earn $8 million more), an absurd amount for a guy with a 0-0 NFL record.
In which case the Giants, smartly, would’ve stood down.
But they would’ve gone after their guy the way teams in 2020 go after players they want, coaches they want, deals they want. If Rhule was the Giants’ guy, they had to make a serious play for him. Instead, they never even got an interview.
It could work out. It worked out for St. John’s, whose search for a basketball coach last spring was filled with clown shoes and banana peels until it found itself hiring the right guy in Mike Anderson. Joe Torre was Clueless Joe the day the Yankees hired him; that turned out OK, too. Really, it is less about the coach than it is the coach’s bosses. He still has everything to prove. But so do they.
For more on the Giants, listen to the latest episode of the “Blue Rush” podcast: