Graham’s defense a shining light in Giants season
Former Yale coach Jack Siedlecki is a big Giants fan, and one of his players invited to a game last season. Not just any player.
Will Blodgett’s wife, Carolyn, is the daughter of co-owner Laurie Tisch. Siedlecki sat in the owner’s box at MetLife Stadium, the whole deal. After the Giants hired Patrick Graham away as defensive coordinator in January, Blodgett emailed Siedlecki to say he’d been in contact with Graham and Graham’s former Yale defensive line coach Duane Brooks.
“Will just emailed me again yesterday,” Siedlecki said. “He was saying, ‘We’re hoping he’s not going to be a head coach too soon. We’d like him to stick around for a while.’ ”
That was a few weeks ago before the Giants dropped three games in a row, before 5-7 turned into 5-10 yet did not kill their chances of winning the NFC East. That is, of course, the biggest joke in the history playoff qualification.
Only it was no joke for the Giants and their fans, and certainly no reflection on Graham. For the 23-19 win Sunday over the Cowboys — whose own fans can be heard around America screaming ‘Why didn’t Mike McCarthy challenge?’ — kept alive their playoff hopes heading into Sunday night.
If the Eagles beat the Washington Football Team on Sunday night, it meant a home playoff game for Big Blue. Crazy, isn’t it?
McCarthy’s inexplicable mistake — failing to challenge for a video review of a trapped catch by Dante Pettis with 6:23 left on a third-and-16 play — gave the Giants 10 extra yards and put them in field goal range. Graham Gano hit a 50-yarder to put New York up four.
Graham’s defense, the shining light of the Giants’ season, took advantage for one final stop. Dallas got the ball to the New York seven with 1:53 before Leonard Williams sacked Andy Dalton for the third time — the team’s sixth. Two plays later, with Williams again in the quarterback’s face, Dalton threw it up for grabs and rookie Xavier McKinney grabbed his first inter
ception in the end zone.
Graham, 41, loves to throw different looks at opponents. He made Russell Wilson look bad in the shocking win over the Seahawks. It can be befuddling, and the Cowboys offense was awful for most of the first half — 24 yards with six minutes left. Dalton was spraying passes all over the place. The Cowboys did make three field goals in the first 30 minutes, but that’s because a botched handoff between Daniel Jones and Wayne Gallman led to an easy one and Greg Zuerlein nailed one from 57 yards as time expired.
Gallman fumbled again on the Giants’ 33 with 58 seconds left in the fourth quarter — a potential disaster — but replays did show he was able to secure the ball.
Phew.
A loss could have spelled the end of Dave Gettleman, 15-33 in three years, as general manager.
A loss could have spelled the end for offensive coordinator Jason Garrett. And after managing only that gift field goal in the second half, who knows where this goes?
Yet if it’s also the end for Graham with the Giants, it will be for another reason.
It would be for a phone call to the Yale graduate for an NFL head coaching job.
After the Giants rose up to beat the Bengals and Seahawks, stories began popping up around the nation about how Graham could soon be a head coach.
A few losses and other folks were pooh-poohing.
The NFL is nothing if not a once-a-week, knee-jerk thing. Who’s hot and who’s not immediately turns into “Who’s a genius? And who’s going to lose every game for the next 10 years?”
Just because it’s Tom Brady 1, Bill Belichick 0 and the Patriots had their first losing season since 2000, it doesn’t mean Belichick is suddenly Rich Kotite. Just because the Jets were crazy enough to win two games after going 0-13, it doesn’t mean they aren’t fully justified in firing Adam Gase (who reportedly will be shown the door).
Anyone who isn’t a fool knows the truth about the 6-10 Giants:
They have one helluva defensive coordinator and they should hide him somewhere in the basement of MetLife Stadium where no other team can find him.
The other day, McCarthy, who had Graham on his Green Bay staff in 2018, raved about Patrick’s intelligence and intensity and the way he challenges schematically while making sure his unit’s fundamentals are sound.
This is the big kid from Crosby High in Waterbury who went to Yale, who in his own words said he underachieved as a Bulldogs football player, but has undoubtedly overachieved as a football coach. The Giants were in the bottom 10 in the NFL and Graham, in his first season since coming over from the Dolphins, has had the defense around the top 10 in various categories. Yes, James Bradberry is an excellent corner, but the Giants are raw at that position. Yes, Williams, with 11.5 sacks, has proved to be a monster and deserves big bucks, but there was a lot of youth on that defense.
Still, the master of disguise was fretting teams were catching up to him. Graham called a halt after a slow start to the drills Thursday, cussed his unit out and made it start all over again.
“I have to do a better job of coaching and laying out the plan,” Graham said on Zoom shortly before that outburst. “I have to do a better job of calling it, mixing in zone and man and stuff like that.”
Giants coach Joe Judge, who worked with Graham on Belichick’s staff, called his DC a man of great depth. He also talked about how they challenged each other in the offseason on everything from schemes to culture.
Defensive back Logan Ryan has talked about how Graham’s the last guy to say, “‘Ah, I’ve got it. I’m the best coordinator. I’m up for a head coaching job. I’m going to just run what I ran last week, it was a masterpiece.’ No, he’s going to go back to the lab, come out with 25 new defenses and we’re going to try to run them and see what looks good and what doesn’t.”
Siedlecki remembers talking to Graham his senior year, how he was interested in coaching — but not sure. He took a job as a PR consultant in Cincinnati. Siedlecki called Walt Hameline at Wagner about Graham becoming a GA while he worked on an MBA. Instead of Wall Street …
“He obviously fell in love with coaching,” Siedlecki said. “He did a couple of very interesting things. Within a few years of getting a full-time job at Richmond, he gave that up to be a graduate assistant again at Notre Dame under Charlie Weis.”
It was during that time in 2008 that Siedlecki and Weis were among a number of coaches that took a trip to the Middle East to visit the troops.
“I asked Charlie about Patrick,” Siedlecki said, “He’s like, ‘He’s going to be a great one.’ ”
Graham had just taken a job at Toledo in 2009 when Belichick called. He hung up. He thought it was a prank. It wasn’t. Graham called back and it was off to New England. Giants defensive line coach Sean Spencer, the well-traveled Coach Chaos from Buckley
High in Hartford, says Graham is unbelievably intelligent and endlessly curious.
“Patrick worked my camp for a number of years,” Siedlecki said. “He actually met Sean there. He’s a little older than Patrick. When I talked to Patrick in August he was kidding, ‘Sean was my boss at camp. I’m his boss now.’ ”
Graham could be the boss of an NFL team soon enough.
“I’m not smart enough to think ahead of today,” Graham has said on a number of occasions. “I’m trying to get better today.”
On Sunday, it was good enough.