BOO MY ASS OUT OF THE STADIUM
Judge: If Giants put up another stinker next week ...
Joe Judge said bring on the boos if next week’s Giants season finale looks anything like Sunday’s historically bad 29-3 loss to the Bears at Soldier Field.
“If we don’t play well, every fan has a right to boo my ass out of the stadium. Got that? That don’t bother me. They have that right,” Judge said after the Giants (4-12) gained -10 net yards passing with Mike Glennon, the lowest by any NFL team since 1998.
Judge, who slipped to 10-22 as a head coach, wasn’t going to let this embarrassment fester, however. Not without delivering an 11-plus minute defense of his program that revealed just how bad it was in East Rutherford before he was hired.
“When I came here, I sat down with all the players and I wanted to know what it was like here and what we had to change,” Judge said. “To a man, every player looked me in the eye and said, ‘Joe, it’s not a team. They don’t play hard, we’re out of playoffs, everybody quit, everybody tapped (out), they stopped showing up to the captains meetings.’ They tapped out.”
Judge said that in a player leadership meeting this week, he had two players – one who’s used to being in playoff contention, one who has never been in a race – tell him the same thing about this year’s Giants:
“Both guys had the same response: everybody on the team is locked in, everyone on the team comes to work to do what they need to do and to do it the right way,” Judge said.
Saquon Barkley, who played for Pat Shurmur in 2018 and 2019, echoed Judge’s insistence that this year’s team is trying harder in the same spot.
“I would say it’s different, being in the same position, guys are coming to work every single day fighting for each other,” Barkley said. “That’s all we have. Obviously the results, especially on offense, aren’t what we’d like it to be.
“But I’m in the locker room,” the running back continued. “I can tell you directly and honestly and truthfully, the love for the game from those guys in the locker room and the passion they have and belief we have in each other is amazing. It’s gonna change at some point. The script is gonna flip.”
Judge wasn’t close to finished stating his case even after losing in blowout fashion to the Bears’ Matt Nagy, a coach who is all-but-guaranteed to be fired at season’s end.
“This ain’t a team that’s having fistfights on the sidelines,” Judge said, seemingly referring to Ron Rivera’s Washington (6-10) team, the Giants’ final opponent, which saw defensive tackles Jonathan Allen and Daron Payne swinging at each other last
week at Dallas.
“This ain’t some clown-show organization,” the coach continued. Interpret that as you will. Antonio Brown did remove his uniform and shirt and quit the reigning champion Buccaneers mid-game against the Jets Sunday.
“The toughest thing to change in a club is the way people think,” Judge added, referring to the Giants’ operations when he arrived in January 2020. “You can get new players. You’ve got to change how people think. You’ve got to change how they f------’ believe in what you’re doing. And they’ve got to trust the process.”
None of this will make Giants fans feel any better about this season, obviously. They want to see results. Glennon and the Giants’ pathetic offensive line produced the opposite of that on Sunday. The quarterback totaled four completions and four turnovers.
Glennon completed 4-of-11 passes for 24 yards with two interceptions, two lost fumbles and four sacks for -34 yards. He fell to 0-4 in his starts the past five weeks. The Giants’ -10 net passing yards were the lowest since Ryan Leaf completed 1-of-15 passes for four yards and lost 23 yards on sacks for the 1998 Chargers, per ESPN Stats & Info.
For some reason, while Judge and Freddie Kitchens came in with intentions on a lopsided 39-16 run-to-pass play-call balance, they dropped Glennon back in an empty formation on the first play of the game, and a Bears sack-forced fumble lit the blowout’s fuse.
Logan Ryan dropped an interception late in the second quarter that gave the Bears a field goal. Pharoh Cooper made what Judge called an “unacceptable” mistake judging the ensuing kickoff, an error that could get Cooper cut today.
Meanwhile, punctuating the offensive personnel disaster built by GM Dave Gettleman, the Rams’ Odell Beckham Jr. caught a game-winning TD on Sunday to beat the Ravens. Remember that trade to improve the “culture?”
Judge wasn’t running from questions about his own job. He said: “I don’t ever ask for patience from anybody.” He prefers the blame be on him, not his players.
“I don’t try to come up here and assassinate some player because I think it’s gonna save my ass,” Judge said. “I’m not gonna come up here like some other coward sitting in front of a microphone and putting his players on blast. Whatever bullet gets fired has got to go through me to get to them.”
Recently, John Mara and the Giants have stressed continued confidence in the second-year head coach anonymously through various media outlets. But the fan base has lost confidence in Mara and co-owner Steve Tisch. This is bigger than one GM or head coach.
The home crowd booed Mara on the halftime stage in Week 3 during a loss to the Falcons, and if Mara was actually listening, he would know the fans weren’t booing that loss or this season. They were booing the franchise. They were booing him.
Judge sounded flabbergasted on Sunday that people don’t seem to understand just what exactly he inherited here.
“You guys ain’t been in the building for two years now with this Covid s---, right?” Judge said. “But I’ll tell you right now, if you’re in the damn building, you walk on through your locker room, you ain’t seeing that crap you saw before. You ain’t seeing guys planning vacations, golf clubs in front of players lockers, you ain’t seeing that stuff. And that’s not because it’s some high school program and we’re cracking the whip, that’s because our guys understand how to pull together as a team and they understand the process we’re going through.”
Judge closed by saying there are former Giants who call him frequently saying they wish they were still here. He said there are players on the team, due to become free agents, “who are in my office every day begging to come back.”
“In terms of the next step to take,” Judge said, “I know we’re a whole lot closer to where we’re going than we are further away.”