FOLLY LA LA
McAdoo almost becoming sympathetic as Big Blue make circus of his demise
THE RAIDERETTES were gett i ng ready to form their postgame funnel, pom-poms at the ready, boots in the air, prepared to usher the victorious Raiders from the field at Oakland Coliseum to the locker room. The public-address announcer called them “the finest females in football!” and the crowd roared at that.
Before they could form their lines, a couple of stone-faced men scurried to beat the players back indoors. Here came John Mara, the Giants’ president. Here came Steve Tisch, Mara’s partner, the team’s chairman and executive vice president. They moved purposefully, wanting to make themselves scarce. This wasn’t their show.
Their show is a lot zanier than this.
Back i ndoors, i ns i de the crowded corridors of the Coliseum, both men offered terse “no comments” when they were hit by the inevitable quest i ons about t heir head coach. It took longer than usual for Ben McAdoo to walk into his postgame press conference after the Giants’ latest loss, 24-17 to the Raiders.
But he made it to the podium with his job intact, still wearing a navy-blue wind breaker with the team logo on the back. Maybe that will change Monday, which is what a broadcast report earlier in the day insisted. But he was going to be allowed on the team charter home, at least.
“I’m going to coach this team for as long as my key card works,” McAdoo said, responding to the first of several pointed questions about his future. To the second one: “I’m going to coach this team until I’m told I’m not coaching this team.” To the third: “I’m not asking. I haven’t heard a thing.” And the fourth: “I’m going to keep my head down.” It was just one more day when you had to take a look around, see the familiar shade of blue, study the old-school, lowercase, interlocking “ny” logo to make sure, really sure, that you were around the Giants. For much of the week, mostly because of who they were starting at quarterback, it was easy to crack wise and wonder if there had been some kind of franchise swap between the Giants and the Jets — the area football team whose reputation is for just the kind of banana-peel slapstick the Giants provided all week. But once the swirl around McAdoo began in earnest, you actually had to find another team in another sport to remember anything remotely like this festival of follies. Next June it will be 10 years since the Mets dragged Willie Randolph across the country on the day after Father’s Day so they could fire him in Anaheim — at 3 in the morning New York time, no less. Until Sunday, that special lunacy was an unmatched outlier of stupid front-office tricks. But if these reports turn out to be true, it will mean that Mara, Tisch and the rest of the Giants’ front office will have managed to do the impossible: They’ll turn McAdoo, who absolutely deserves to be fired on merit, into a sympathetic case thanks to this 6,000-mile round-trip voyage to nowhere. And that’s just impossible to fathom. Even if there is still at least one voice of support from within.
“I don’t want that,” Eli Manning said, referring to McAdoos’ dismissal. Manning, as you’d expect, played the good soldier all afternoon, opting against wearing a baseball cap and going bare-headed in the California sun for all 60 minutes, offering counsel and support for both Geno Smith and offensive coordinator Mike Sullivan.
“I don’t want anyone to get fired. When a coach gets f ired, it’s usually because the team and the players, and myself, haven’t performed to our duties. So I don’t want to see that. I hope there’s no truth to it.”
On one level, it doesn’t matter much if McAdoo goes now or in four weeks, though it really is hard to conjure just how ugly next week at the Meadowlands might be for him (assuming the entire joint isn’t taken over completely by Cowboys fans, that is). The only hope is that the chants saluting Eli might counter the boos trying to drown McAdoo.
Although, McAdoo being McAdoo, right to the end, tone deaf as always, he leads with hi slip :“Maybe for weak-minded individuals it may be a distraction, but I had a job to do.”
For the moment, anyway. For the moment.