Power of the people: Mara throws vocal masses bone before chaos grew
THE GREAT irony is this: The schedule had smiled on the 2017 Giants. Are you kidding? Just get to Week 12, head above water, and this is what they would be looking at: four games to play, three of them in the chilly but comfortably charming confines of MetLife Stadium. One against the Cowboys. One against the Eagles. One against the Redskins. You couldn’t dream that up any better if you were the one drawing up the schedule yourself, and if your first goal of the year was to win the NFC East. Get to December within shouting distance of first place, then let your fans loose on the scoundrels from Dallas and Philly and D.C. It was a dream scenario.
Some dream. With dreams like that, who needs nightmares?
Instead, this is what John Mara was looking at for the final furlong of his season: a best-case scenario of fans burning their tickets, buying up billboards, flying planes with messages attached to the back, with the added a bonus of an alumni insurrection, ex-players possibly showing up with No. 10 jerseys, all of this before an empty stadium. A worse-case scenario of those fans keeping their tickets, coming simply to chant for Eli Manning and slander Ben McAdoo. And a worst-case scenario of Cowboys fans, Eagles fans and Redskins fans snapping up all those unused tickets, filling the stadium with their foreign vestments, and turning MetLife into AT&TLincolnFedEx Field.
Mara was profoundly shaped by the downtrodden Giants of the ’60s and ’70s, the hapless teams of his childhood and his teenage and college years when losing was the norm, when entire generations of New York fans adopted the Cowboys and the Dolphins and the Steelers and the Raiders. Those years are never far away from his conscience because he knows, firsthand, that sometimes it’s not simply an idle threat when fans talk about fighting back with their voices first, then their wallets, then their loyalties.
“I’ve lived through this before,” he has said hundreds of times, most recently (and most poignantly) at Giants headquarters Monday afternoon.
He knows what Football Apocalypse looks like. And wanted no part of it.
“I know how much the fans are suffering,” Mara said, a few hours after dismissing Jerry Reese as his general manager and Ben McAdoo as his coach, the first such massive housecleaning since the aftermath of The Fumble in 1978. “Believe me, I’m suffering more. I guarantee it.”
So sensitive is Mara to what his customers want, it sure seems by all appearances that Eli Manning will be back behind center Sunday against the Cowboys, which flies in the face of what he insisted last week, that it was a top-down decision to use the balance of a lost season to see what’s been hiding behind Eli on the depth chart. It’s a significant shift. Fans weren’t necessarily enraged by the fact of Manning being benched, just the tone-deaf way McAdoo went about it — and the fact that it was Geno Smith being foisted on them, not Davis Webb.
But you can also see, pretty clearly, what the thinking around the Giants is now: in for a dime, in for a dollar. Mara and Steve Tisch not only feed their frenzied faithful raw red meat by tossing them the professional carcasses of Reese
and McAdoo, but they throw in dessert, allowing them at least one more chance to see No. 10 fully restored behind center — against the detested Cowboys, no less.
“After all this losing, I’m focused on winning games,” Mara said, adding for emphasis: “I won’t put up with any talk about tanking.”
That, of course, is also sure to create a reaction among fans who, in putting up with this grisly 2-10 start to the season, also saw the Giants pull alongside the 49ers by losing to the Raiders on Sunday — after San Francisco had beaten the Bears — and figure a high draft pick would be an acceptable consolation prize for an unwatchable football season. Not that it really matters. Eli may be the people’s choice but it’s not like the Giants offense looked sig- nificantly worse in Smith’s hands in Oakland than it did in Manning’s for the 11 weeks prior.
“I don’t think there was any one final straw,’’ Mara said of Monday’s reckoning. “I just think that where we are as a franchise right now ... We’ve kind of been spiraling out of control. I just felt like we needed a complete overhaul.’’
And they will get one, a new GM, a new coach, a fresh start to erase the sting of this season, of the McAdoo Era, of the last half of Reese’s reign that featured too many empty drafts and too many short rosters, wasting the bulk of Manning’s prime. The fans get what they want, and Mara gets what he wants, something to camouflage the chaos that’s co-opted his franchise.
He — and you — should be less concerned about re-establishing the “Giants Way” that has always been far more fable than fact. Those 18 playoff-free years connecting 1963 and 1981 that so shaped the sensibilities of the Giants’ president? There was plenty of slapstick and dysfunction to go around in those days, too. That didn’t end by recommitting to some ethereal “Way” — it ended when Mara’s father and uncle hired a GM named Young and a coach named Parcells with the goods to make their own way.
That’s the mission for Mara and Tisch now. They may have avoided an East Rutherford revolution on Monday. Starting Tuesday comes the tricky part.