John Mara: I haven’t given fans ‘any reason to believe’ I can fix Giants

John Mara has lived through it all, but this is the worst it has been.

The worst he has felt about the Giants franchise he directs, leads and owns.

The day after he fired his head coach, Joe Judge, two days after he sent his general manager, Dave Gettleman, off into retirement and three days after the Giants finished up yet another abysmal season, Mara admitted the current state of the Giants leaves him more embarrassed than ever before.

“Honestly I would have to say yes. Yes it is,’’ Mara said Wednesday. “I kept thinking during the season that we had hit rock bottom and then each week it got a little worse. Honestly, I’m not proud of saying this, but if I’m going to be 100 percent honest I would have to say the answer is yes.’’

There is nothing to be proud of with the Giants. They are looking for their third general manager in the last five years. They soon will be looking for their fifth head coach in the last eight years. They are coming off a season where they went 4-13 and lost their last six games by a combined score of 163-56. Their record of 22-59 in the last five seasons is tied with their MetLife Stadium co-inhabitants, the Jets, for the dead last in the NFL.

Embarrassing.

Mara and Steve Tisch are the co-owners, but it is Mara who is involved in every aspect of the football operation. He is the front man for all of the failure and he has lost the faith the fans once had in him. That last Super Bowl triumph was more than a decade ago.

There is a general manager to hire and then a head coach to bring in. Why should anyone believe Mara will get this right when almost everything for too long has gone so wrong?

“Well, I haven’t given them any reason to believe that,’’ Mara said. “It’s up to me to make the right choices, up to Steve and I to make the right choices going forward to earn back their trust, and that is not gonna be an overnight process, that’s gonna take some time. But it starts with getting the general manager done correctly and then with hiring the right head coach.’’

The larger question: Does Mara believe he is capable of making smart decisions, based on his recent track record?

“I do, and obviously I don’t expect a lot of people to believe that, given what’s happened over the last few years,’’ he said.

Mara after hiring Judge two years ago vowed to have more patience this time around than he displayed with Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur. The lack of progress overwhelmed the promise of patience.

“In terms of forcing myself, I wanted to do that very badly this year but I just didn’t see any end in sight,’’ Mara said.

The end came swiftly for Judge, 10-23 in his two years. There was no thought of dismissing him in late December, but quarterback Daniel Jones went down with a sprained neck and the offense, no great shakes with him, crumbled without him. Judge survived the Black Monday firings around the league, but a day later Mara informed him he was gone, with three years (and about $15 million) remaining on his contract.

“There is nothing more painful to me than making that long walk down the hallway to tell somebody, particularly a good person like Joe that we’re making a change,’’ Mara said. “It’s gut-wrenching for me, it’s been gut-wrenching every time I’ve had to do it. Obviously I’ve had to do it far too often lately. That’s why we’re in this process again and we’re gonna get it right this time.’’

The Giants thought they got it right with Judge. It was the bad football and all the losing that hastened his demise, but Judge also hurt his own cause down the stretch.

The back-to-back quarterback sneaks in the season-ending 22-7 loss to Washington were not helpful.

“Those weren’t my favorite play calls in the world,’’ Mara said. “That was just one minor factor in the overall scheme of things.’’

Judge’s 11-minute rant in Chicago after a 29-3 loss — he said the Giants were not one of the “clown show organizations,’’ clearly referring to Washington, and said Shurmur’s 2019 team quit and “tapped out’’ — was not met with Mara’s approval.

“I wasn’t thrilled with that particular press conference, but I can’t say there was one specific act that was the last straw, it was just a culmination of things,’’ Mara said. “We just got to a point where I thought we had dug ourselves a hole so deep and I didn’t see a clear path to getting out of it unless we blew it up and started all over again.

“I still think there is a really good head coach inside of Joe Judge. I just felt given where we are right now, on the verge of bringing in a new general manager, we have to give that person the flexibility to bring in the head coach that he wants. I just felt that we really needed to start from the ground up again.’’

And here the Giants are. Starting all over. Again.