Know your game

Evening guys: If Christmas, draft day and opening day are the best days of the year is the Monday morning the day after you've been eliminated the worst? Realize I am a little late to the debate, but I was going to post the following on the GBN but then thought it better to go to the source. Slightly different take on the current situation from someone who has seen it all since the late 1950s.

A wise man recently told me that ‘if you are going to play a game, know the game you are going to play!’ He was referring to poker, but he could just as easily have been talking about any game or sport including the NFL. Truth is the NFL is not Fantasy football; it’s not Madden football; you don’t get do-overs and get to make the call in hindsight. Winning in the NFL is hard; there is no competitive advantage; there’s no magic formula; nobody’s really smarter than anybody else.

In the end, as George Young cogently said years ago: you gather as much information as you can; you make the best decisions you can to put the best team on the field; and then you cross your fingers an hope your players stay healthy and play to their ability. And every once in a while you hit a run. However, nobody wins all the time. Indeed, most of the NFL personnel rules are designed to ensure some degree of parity across the league, such that with very few exceptions, you have a run, but eventually what goes up must come done and players get old and retire, they get hurt or leave as free agents and you have to rebuild.

In fact, by our unofficial count the Giants are the only team in the league to have had multiple Super Bowl runs since the early 1980s, including the miraculous 07/11 titles. But that team is gone. Indeed, within 2-3 years of the 2011 SB the Giants lost to one thing or another RBs Bradshaw and Jacobs, WRs Nicks, Cruz and Manningham, TE Jake Ballard, OTs Dave Diehl and Kareem McKenzie (and this year Will Beatty), OGs Chris Snee and Kevin Boothe and C David Baas, DEs Justin Tuck, Osi, Kiwi (along with JPP for all intents and purposes this year), DT Chris Canty, CBs Corey Webster and Terrell Thomas and safeties Antrel Rolle, Kenny Phillips and Deon Grant! As a result, they have been faced with having to replace for all intents and purposes literally every starter other than Eli in very short order for no other reason than the vagaries of attrition and the reality that this is what happens in the NFL.

In fact, looking at it this way one could almost make a better argument that the Giants have actually done a rather remarkable job remaining reasonably competitive the past 2-3 years given these losses than somebody’s to blame and should be fired! And in fact if indeed as some (including this rather humble analyst) have theorized that the Giants are very possibly ‘close’ then one could actually looking at a potentially historic turnaround given what usually happens in the NFL. Indeed, ask fans in places like Buffalo, Miami, Cleveland, Tennessee, Jacksonville, Houston, San Diego, Oakland, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Atlanta, St. Louis and the Jets across the hall how long it takes to build a Super Bowl team and they’d answer effing forever.

The Giants – did I mention they are only team with multiple Super Bowl runs since the 1980s – have a very good organization run by very good football people and they’ll get it turned around sooner rather than later. In particular, when George Young put in place the current Giants’ management structure way back when two of the most crucial building blocks were stability and patience. Play the odds!