It’s time to put some life back into MetLife
THERE was a time, and it feels like an eternity ago, when Giants Stadium was a House of Pain, and the team that defended it was feared.
The New York Football Giants have won two of their past 12 games at MetLifeless Stadium and are 0-4 there this season — with Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jason Pierre-Paul and the Buccaneers visiting on Sunday.
So it is past time for the Giants to stop cheating their loyal fans.
They won one for themselves at San Francisco. Now win one for your fans.
“It’s definitely gonna feel good to have our fans behind us, and it’s gonna be really important to us to get this win for us and them,” Evan Engram said.
There wasn’t a place a Jersey guy named Bill Parcells would rather have been than on the Giants Stadium sidelines coaching his Giants in the icy, wind-chilled winter of his young career.
“You want me to give you a description of the day?” Parcells asked The Post over the phone. “I’d like it to be in late November or early December ... I would like it to be a sunny day, [with] high winds, where the flags are crackin’ on the top of the stadium ... and I’d like to be playing somebody from the West Coast.” Or perhaps a team from Tampa. “I don’t think any stadium is intimidating, but when you have elements in play like we did, and you have the kind of decent defensive players we had and the kind of ground attack we had, that’s hard to overcome,” Parcells said. “The elements can be, for a team that’s inferior, a great equalizer. But for a team that’s superior, in some places, if you’re able to play pretty much mistake-free, that just adds to your dominance.”
Parcells flashed back to Dec. 16, 1989, a 15-0 victory over the 1-14 Troy Aikman Cowboys.
“He was a rookie, it was Jimmy Johnson’s first year,” Parcells said. “It was cold and it was windy. We weren’t great, but we were a lot better than them, and it was one of those days where you couldn’t throw the ball. And I remember late in the third quarter or the fourth quarter, we were sacking him and hitting him every time, I mean, it was bad.
“I remember on the phone I was talking to [his offensive coordinator] Ron Erhardt. I said, ‘This kid over here on that other side, he doesn’t know it right now, but this is gonna serve him well because he’s not gonna go through another day like this any time.’ ”
When Parcells coached the Cowboys, he reminded Aikman, who completed 11-of-22 passes 84 yards, of that day.
“He didn’t even blink. He said, ‘The worst day of my life in football,’ ” Parcells said. “I was feeling sorry for him.
“It’s not the place that was intimidating. It’s the people playing in it. That’s what makes things intimidating.”
And yet, ever since they said goodbye to dear old Giants Stadium at the end of the 2009 season, the Giants, thanks to a 7-1 home record in 2016, are 34-34 in the stadium they share with the Jets ... if you count the 2010 wild-card victory over the Falcons on their way to Super Bowl XLVI ... Eli Manning’s lone home playoff win.
“When we beat the Redskins [17-0, Jan. 11, 1987] to get to the Super Bowl [XXI],” Harry Carson once said, “We were all one: the team, the fans and the stadium.”
Lawrence Taylor once said, “When I think of this place, I think of bitterly cold afternoons and hard hits and fans that wouldn’t let us lose, that wouldn’t let the other guys out of here alive.”
“The fans were close, everybody had a pretty good seat, they were noisy. ... I thought it was a good advantage for us,” Parcells said.
“But I used to tell my team, we’re going on the road, I said, ‘Hey these stadiums don’t play these games. It’s the teams that play the games.’ ”
The home team that has been playing at MetLifeless Stadium owes Giants fans better.
“You want to win for the fans who come and support us, you want to win for my teammates. ... We’ve stayed committed, and it’s gonna pay off,” Manning said, “and so we just gotta keep working hard and hope we can give a good showing and get the crowd into it and give ’em something to cheer about.”
And turn MetLifeless into MetLife.