Here’s hoping Giants’ guy is no average Joe
Big Blue needs Judge to be more like Parcells than Mangini
They’re always the perfect guy coming in the door. This time it’s Joe Judge. Perfect coaching pedigree. Belichick and Saban. Killed it in the interview. Won the press conference. This means they’re all saying pretty much the same things about Judge they once said about Eric Mangini, back when he was the boy wonder off Belichick’s staff.
Oh, sure. Here is what Jets owner Woody Johnson said about Mangini when the Jets got him out of New England:
“He’s got a strong pedigree,” Johnson said at the time. “He’s been a major contributor to a very successful organization. The most important thing is he demonstrated to us a passion for football, a passion for teaching. He knows something about the culture of football that appealed to us.”
Of course this doesn’t mean that Judge is Mangini. It’s just worth remembering that there was a time when Mangini was the same 30-something hot kid off Belichick’s staff that Judge is now.
Oh, you can tell how much John Mara and Dave Gettleman and (VP of Football Operations) Kevin Abrams were swept away by their interview with Judge. By all accounts – and the Giants PR machine has been working overtime on this one this week, on a guy hardly anybody except Belichick knew a lot about last week – Judge absolutely killed it in his interview, hands down. You want to know the last guy in the big city who did that in an interview?
Mickey Callaway.
The Jets once thought Mangenius was the Next Thing. The Mets thought the same thing about Mickey Callaway, who during his interview practically had them at hello. Now the Giants feel that way about 38-year-old Joe Judge. You know why? Because they are desperate to find the Next Thing. Or Next Parcells.
It just doesn’t happen around here all that often. This is about the endless search for the Next Parcells. He was the assistant no one knew much about and then George Young hired him and Bill survived 312-1, and set about changing the modern history of the New York Giants. Jeff Van Gundy was an assistant under Pat Riley and Don Nelson that only the players really knew about when Dave Checketts fired Nelson and replaced him with Van Gundy. He never won a title with the Knicks. But he should have won in 1997 and he made it to the Finals in 1999 and even with an old wounded team in 2000, the Knicks made it to the Eastern Conference finals before losing in six to the Pacers.
“I’m gonna give it to Jeff,” Checketts said at the time. The rest was more great Knicks history in the 90s, even if they didn’t take home their first title since 1973.
All these owners fire up a prayer and hope it works. The Yankees took a shot on Joe Torre after he’d lost three managing jobs in his life, including the Mets as playermanager. And Joe became one of the greatest managers in Yankees history, which is saying plenty. He was even more than that. He was one of the great top managers in all of pro sports at this time, changing not just the course of Yankees history, but changing their brand, too. There is no way, even now, to quantify how much he meant.
The Jets haven’t had that guy in 50 years. The Mets had Davey Johnson in the 80s, and he became the first Mets manager since Gil Hodges to win it all. The Knicks keep looking for somebody to carry things the way Van Gundy did after Pat Riley had faxed his way down to South Beach after the 1995 season.
Terry Collins went to a World Series five years ago. Rex Ryan twice came within a victory of taking the Jets back to the Super Bowl. The Jets thought he was going to be a game changer. He wasn’t in the end. You know how the Giants have done since the reign of Tom Coughlin, whom the Giants hired not long after he’d taken the Jaguars to the AFC Championship Game in their second year of operation. First it was Ben McAdoo who was going to be their boy wonder, as they gave Coughlin a shove toward the door. Then it was going to be Pat Shurmur.
Now they are head over heels in love with Judge, and boy, all you have to be able to do is read a paper or turn on the radio and television, because there has been a nonstop cycle letting you know just how much. It’s reached the point where you get the idea that if they’d talked to