Coach waited too long to call out lackluster effort
BEN McADOO is now Dead Coach Fighting.
Fighting to keep his dream job, against all odds.
“It’ s probably the greatest opportunity in my life, these next seven weeks,” McAdoo said inside the field house after practice. “A lot of doubt out there, whether it’s in the building or not. But there’s doubt definitely on the outside, so we have a chance to flip the script the last seven weeks.”
In the wake of Rams 51, Giants 17, and 49 ers31,G ian ts21, McAdooi snow mulling lineup changes and showing up as Bill Parcells in the meeting room, displaying film evidence of players either quitting or not caring, or not caring enough or not gritty enough to play hurt, or simply not good enough. Not-So Gentle Ben. Defiant Ben. “Listen, I’m comfortable in my own skin, I’m built for this,” McAdoo said.
“A calm doesn’t suit me, a storm does.”
Unfortunately for him, this is the football version of a Category 5 hurricane.
“The tougher it gets, the better I’m gonna get,” McAdoo said. “The better I expect this team to get down the stretch.”
Someone asked if he ever allows any self-doubt to creep in. “Nope,” McAdoo said. What else can he say at this point? Ownership threw him a seven-game lifeline on Monday, so of course he is swimming to it. In shark-infested waters. Alas, it is a curious time to call out players on tape and shame them for all to see.
“As a man,” Jay Bromley said, “you don’t want to be rebuked in front of everybody.
“People hate the truth because it’s painful. But you need the truth so you can change. You need the truth so you can grow.”
Better late than never is better than never. But too late. For them, and for him. McAdoo should have been brutally honest with these play-
ers long before it got to 1-8, long before two anonymous players threw him under the bus, long b e fo re Dominique Rodgers - Cromartie and Janoris Jenkins earned their suspensions.
He could have shown them the Ereck Flowers turnstile tape against Ziggy Ansah in Week 2, the day after he publicly rebuked Eli Manning for “sloppy quarterback play” that caused a fourthand-goal delay-of-game penalty. He could have shown them Odell Beckham Jr. pantomiming urination in the end zone in Week 3, or Jenkins and Eli Apple colliding on the completion that set up Jake Elliott’s 61-yard f ield goal. He could have shown them thirdand-33 against the Rams. He could have showed them a Brad Wing shank at Tampa Bay. He absolutely had to show them Jenkins mailing it in against the 49ers.
And McAdoo admitted as much when he stood before his 1-8 team.
“He thought he should have done this a week ago,” Bromley told The Post. “As we’re trying to learn from our mistakes, he’s learning from his mistakes.”
“I think it would put guys in a different attention span, put us on alert,” Rodgers-Cromartie said. “Ain’t nobody want to have a play up there where you got to come back in the locker room and everybody is looking at you like you’re yo that guy. So I think it could have ha helped if it was done earlier or not, but at least it got done.”
No one expected growing pains this severe from McAdoo, who has given new meaning to Sophomore Slump.
“It takes a certain kind of individual to take all the bull that’s thrown in their face and keep smiling,” Bromley said, “and that’s the kind of guy McAdoo is. I know that’s the kind of guy I am.”
McAdoo talked about running to adversity, which I suppose is more noble and courageous than running from it.
“He’s been through the ups and downs with great quarterbacks, bad quarterbacks, good teams, bad teams,” Bromley said. “There’s nothing he hasn’t seen. This is just another aspect of his career.
“He knows the backlash he gets from letting go a two-time Super Bowl-winning champion like Coach [Tom] Coughlin, he knows what comes with the territory. This is New York. You gotta be ready for this. And I’m a New Yorker, so I know what it is. You gotta be built tough. “He ain’t flinched yet.” But everyone watching his team has.