For Big Blue, escaping rock bottom won’t be as hard this time

IN A week we will be inching up on the 10th anniversary of the Giants’ Victor Cruz Game against the Jets, which means we will begin a month of 10th-anniversary benchmarks that will bypass nostalgia, bypass melancholy and take the passing lane all the way to depressing, because every one will be a stark reminder of where the Giants were Then.

And where they are Now.

And sometimes, the chasm between the two can feel like the Grand Canyon. How do you even begin? Just thinking about it can be exhausting. And Giants fans of a certain age have an extra added burden: the hard-to-shake sense of déjà vu. Which is why you hear the name “George Young” an awful lot these days. Which is why Giants fans talk about rented planes and furious signs, and the wistful days of burning season tickets in steel drums.

I am not here to serve as the cartoon dog, festooned with fedora in that ubiquitous internet meme, sipping coffee and declaring “This is fine” while the room burns around him. In two lesser-known panels of that strip, the pooch also says, “I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently,” and, as he finally begins to melt: “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.” Well, things are not OK. But I am here to assure you of this: As amazing, as improbable, as impossible as this may seem, it could be worse.

Because the era that is generally cited for comparison’s sake, the playoff-free run from 1964 through 1980 that included only two winning seasons in those 17 years — that really was worse. And the elixir moment often cited — Young’s arrival off Don Shula’s staff on Valentine’s Day 1979 — was a much lower rock bottom than where the Giants sit now.

It may be close. But they aren’t quite there.

There are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, the Giants are only 10 years removed from their most recent taste of glory. The sign that flew over the Meadowlands in 1978 cited 15 years of lousy football, though it was actually 22 since the Giants had previously won a title. And the difference between football in 2011 and 2021 compared to the gap between 1956 and 1979 isn’t nearly as great. Start there.

The league is better designed to help weak teams get stronger, quicker, than it was in 1979, when Pete Rozelle’s dreams of “parity” were only beginning to take root. In those years, bad teams stayed bad for years, often decades. If that’s part of what makes the Giants’ inability to get their house in order the last 10 years so inexcusable, it’s also just an easier task than it was in 1979.

But the main reason why things aren’t as bad as they were is a simple one:

The Giants now, as then, have two owners. But by all accounts John Mara and Steve Tisch get along well, are on the same page philosophically, and don’t have a fundamental personality clash.

Back in ’79, Mara’s father, Wellington,

and cousin, Tim, couldn’t stand to be in the same room together. That was mostly an open secret for years until the Miracle of the Meadowlands, a seismic event in which the GM, Andy Robustelli, resigned the next day and the coach, John McVay, was let go immediately after the season.

That 6-10 season ended on Dec. 17. And for the next 59 days the Giants were paralyzed because where Wellington saw white, Tim saw black. As one Giants employee of the day once explained it: “If Wellington and Tim were both looking at the sun on a cloudless day, one would insist it was about to rain and the other that it was about to snow.”

That’s why Rozelle had to step in, why he had to twist two Maras’ arms to reach one consensus. In those 59 days every piece of the family’s dirty laundry landed in the papers. The Giants had never referred to their football boss as a “general manager” before. He was “director of operations,” because Wellington was the presumptive GM. Young insisted he be called a GM. He was hired, essentially, because it made too much sense not to.

“If you can’t hire all of Don Shula,” Well Mara said that day, “we were glad to get his right arm.”

That’s how bad it was. Wrote Paul Zimmerman in the next day’s Post: “Hiring Young as GM is so logical I never would have expected the Maras to do it.”

Forty-three years later, logic wouldn’t be such a bad tool to wield again. And at least the two men in charge are on speaking terms. That’s a plus.