Was such a ridiculous game. You can practically see the ghosts and demons on the field that day. Much like the great 07-08 postseason run, if you scripted it, no one would believe you.
brings back great memories. Man did I love Rob Carpenter. He really gave us a bonafide ground game! I forgot about guys like Tom Mullady and Ernest Gray!
The Giants had been an NFL laughingstock for close to two decades, just an inept joke of a franchise. The 50's Giants Championship teams were pre-Super Bowl glory days only older fans remembered. A perennial punching bag for the Cowboys and Eagles, always on the wrong end of trash talk.
What a fun season 1981 was for Giants fans:
- LT explodes like a supernova on the NFL scene, and the whole team dynamic changes. Everybody is talking about him and the Giants
- Bill Parcells' comes in as DC, switches from the old 4-3 to the 3-4 and suddenly Taylor, Carson, Van Pelt and Kelly are *THE* stud group of LB's just wrecking people
- Still not much talent on O, but Phil Simms starts to look like a real QB of future after two seasons lost to injuries and lousy teams
- 4th Rd pick Bill Neill emerges as a beast at NT, combining with undrafted Curtis McGriff and Gary Jeter to form a super tough D-Line that nobody was running on.
- George Young trades a 4th Rd? pick for FB Rob Carpenter (stuck on the bench behind Earl Campbell) mid-season, and the kid rips off back to back 100 yd games and suddenly we have a running attack.
- Simms goes down against Washington in November and we lose in OT, but Scott Brunner plays better than anybody expects and there's still a glimmer.
- The build up for the final game of the season is crazy, with a lot of doom-and-gloom, we-cant-beat-the-Tom-Landry-Cowboys shit flying around. But, then blocking TE Tom Mullady catches his only TD of the season in the 2nd half, and cardiac Joe Danelo kicks the game winner in OT to FINALLY beat Dallas and get into the playoffs, and every Giants fan is going batshit crazy!!
- The first Giants playoff game since the Kennedy administration is against Philly at the shithole Vet, and the talk everywhere is how the lucky / fluky Giants will get crushed by the defending NFC Champ Ron Jaworski Eagles, but on 3rd and long Punt Returner Leon Bright loops out of the backfield for his only TD catch of the season...
The Giants had been an NFL laughingstock for close to two decades, just an inept joke of a franchise. The 50's Giants Championship teams were pre-Super Bowl glory days only older fans remembered. A perennial punching bag for the Cowboys and Eagles, always on the wrong end of trash talk.
What a fun season 1981 was for Giants fans:
- LT explodes like a supernova on the NFL scene, and the whole team dynamic changes. Everybody is talking about him and the Giants
- Bill Parcells' comes in as DC, switches from the old 4-3 to the 3-4 and suddenly Taylor, Carson, Van Pelt and Kelly are *THE* stud group of LB's just wrecking people
- Still not much talent on O, but Phil Simms starts to look like a real QB of future after two seasons lost to injuries and lousy teams
- 4th Rd pick Bill Neill emerges as a beast at NT, combining with undrafted Curtis McGriff and Gary Jeter to form a super tough D-Line that nobody was running on.
- George Young trades a 4th Rd? pick for FB Rob Carpenter (stuck on the bench behind Earl Campbell) mid-season, and the kid rips off back to back 100 yd games and suddenly we have a running attack.
- Simms goes down against Washington in November and we lose in OT, but Scott Brunner plays better than anybody expects and there's still a glimmer.
- The build up for the final game of the season is crazy, with a lot of doom-and-gloom, we-cant-beat-the-Tom-Landry-Cowboys shit flying around. But, then blocking TE Tom Mullady catches his only TD of the season in the 2nd half, and cardiac Joe Danelo kicks the game winner in OT to FINALLY beat Dallas and get into the playoffs, and every Giants fan is going batshit crazy!!
- The first Giants playoff game since the Kennedy administration is against Philly at the shithole Vet, and the talk everywhere is how the lucky / fluky Giants will get crushed by the defending NFC Champ Ron Jaworski Eagles, but on 3rd and long Punt Returner Leon Bright loops out of the backfield for his only TD catch of the season...
A play I will NEVER forget, me and my great old Dad going going crazy together in front of a tiny little TV
...Scott Brunner tosses a couple more TD passes, and we beat Philly for the first playoff win since the Frank Gifford days, and it's mass hysteria!!
Yea, the Giants lose the following week to the eventual SB champ 49ers, but the G-Men didn't back down an inch and played them tough all day.
Everything was different after 1981. Every. Damn. Thing. was different.
I thought the Giants were already using the 3-4 starting in 1979. There’s a book I have indicating they were.
I turned 12. I followed the headlines in 1980 and decided to throw in for the 81 season. Up until then I was a baseball nut and loved everything yankees.
I had a 4 hour general chemistry final that morning
My parents had a stucco ceiling in the family room at the time.
When Hunt intercepted that pass I jumped with my fists up, but I was too exuberant and hit the ceiling with my fists. My knuckles were bleeding profusely and I had bits of stucco embedded in them. I wrapped my hands in a dish towel and refused to stop watching until Danelo hit that FG.
and with some improvement in the running game a real team. After the disastrous disgraceful mid 60’s thru 70’s and all the problems on off the field ‘81 seemed like redemption.
It was. Not a fake like we’ve had since but redemption that our team in blue was no longer a laughing stock and would be a legitimate challenger for sometime to come.
Maybe that’s where we are today, but let’s see it on the field this season.
Somehow the Giants managed to win 9 games with absolutely no offense. That season was carried by the defense (5 TDs scored) and Rob Carpenter in a mid-season trade. I've gone back and watched some of the old 1981 games on YouTube, the offense was even worse than I'd remembered, but the defense was incredible, probably close to the 1986 edition. Nobody had ever seen anything like rookie Lawrence Taylor before, offenses had no idea how to deal with him.
I was at the Dallas game in December, if there ever was a more improbable win for the Giants, I've not seen it. That Dallas team was loaded and primed for a Super Bowl run, but the Giants played their hearts out. The Wild Card win at Philadelphia the next week felt like a Super Bowl championship. A whole generation of football fans witnessed Giants post-season success for the first time.
There had even been talk of a NY-NY Super Bowl as the Jets had made the playoffs for the first time in a decade, the hype made it a special time to be a football fan in NY after the dreadful 1970s.
1981 and 1990 were both great, but also bittersweet...
... for those of us who believed strongly in Phil Simms. At least Jeff Hostetler was, by 1990, a legitimate NFL QB, and Phil’s arm was starting to fade. Scott Brunner was just plain bad, and he never got any better. In the NFL of 1981, he was barely adequate. After the 1982 strike, as the NFL started to tweak rules to favor the pass, a mechanical game manager like Brunner was a dead end. When he had to be more than that in 1983, all of his flaws were exposed.
That said, the stretch run in 1981 was a fun ride, from the Perry Williams interception all the way to the end.
Giants of all time. He always walked the fine line between very good and great. If he didn't have so many injuries, he could easily have been the Giants greatest QB of all time. Those injuries came at the worst times and except for 1990 and Jeff Hostetler, there was no viable backup. What could have been...
Go GIANTS!
What a fun season 1981 was for Giants fans:
- LT explodes like a supernova on the NFL scene, and the whole team dynamic changes. Everybody is talking about him and the Giants
- Bill Parcells' comes in as DC, switches from the old 4-3 to the 3-4 and suddenly Taylor, Carson, Van Pelt and Kelly are *THE* stud group of LB's just wrecking people
- Still not much talent on O, but Phil Simms starts to look like a real QB of future after two seasons lost to injuries and lousy teams
- 4th Rd pick Bill Neill emerges as a beast at NT, combining with undrafted Curtis McGriff and Gary Jeter to form a super tough D-Line that nobody was running on.
- George Young trades a 4th Rd? pick for FB Rob Carpenter (stuck on the bench behind Earl Campbell) mid-season, and the kid rips off back to back 100 yd games and suddenly we have a running attack.
- Simms goes down against Washington in November and we lose in OT, but Scott Brunner plays better than anybody expects and there's still a glimmer.
- The build up for the final game of the season is crazy, with a lot of doom-and-gloom, we-cant-beat-the-Tom-Landry-Cowboys shit flying around. But, then blocking TE Tom Mullady catches his only TD of the season in the 2nd half, and cardiac Joe Danelo kicks the game winner in OT to FINALLY beat Dallas and get into the playoffs, and every Giants fan is going batshit crazy!!
- The first Giants playoff game since the Kennedy administration is against Philly at the shithole Vet, and the talk everywhere is how the lucky / fluky Giants will get crushed by the defending NFC Champ Ron Jaworski Eagles, but on 3rd and long Punt Returner Leon Bright loops out of the backfield for his only TD catch of the season...
A play I will NEVER forget, me and my great old Dad going going crazy together in front of a tiny little TV
...Scott Brunner tosses a couple more TD passes, and we beat Philly for the first playoff win since the Frank Gifford days, and it's mass hysteria!!
Yea, the Giants lose the following week to the eventual SB champ 49ers, but the G-Men didn't back down an inch and played them tough all day.
Everything was different after 1981. Every. Damn. Thing. was different.
What a fun season 1981 was for Giants fans:
- LT explodes like a supernova on the NFL scene, and the whole team dynamic changes. Everybody is talking about him and the Giants
- Bill Parcells' comes in as DC, switches from the old 4-3 to the 3-4 and suddenly Taylor, Carson, Van Pelt and Kelly are *THE* stud group of LB's just wrecking people
- Still not much talent on O, but Phil Simms starts to look like a real QB of future after two seasons lost to injuries and lousy teams
- 4th Rd pick Bill Neill emerges as a beast at NT, combining with undrafted Curtis McGriff and Gary Jeter to form a super tough D-Line that nobody was running on.
- George Young trades a 4th Rd? pick for FB Rob Carpenter (stuck on the bench behind Earl Campbell) mid-season, and the kid rips off back to back 100 yd games and suddenly we have a running attack.
- Simms goes down against Washington in November and we lose in OT, but Scott Brunner plays better than anybody expects and there's still a glimmer.
- The build up for the final game of the season is crazy, with a lot of doom-and-gloom, we-cant-beat-the-Tom-Landry-Cowboys shit flying around. But, then blocking TE Tom Mullady catches his only TD of the season in the 2nd half, and cardiac Joe Danelo kicks the game winner in OT to FINALLY beat Dallas and get into the playoffs, and every Giants fan is going batshit crazy!!
- The first Giants playoff game since the Kennedy administration is against Philly at the shithole Vet, and the talk everywhere is how the lucky / fluky Giants will get crushed by the defending NFC Champ Ron Jaworski Eagles, but on 3rd and long Punt Returner Leon Bright loops out of the backfield for his only TD catch of the season...
A play I will NEVER forget, me and my great old Dad going going crazy together in front of a tiny little TV
...Scott Brunner tosses a couple more TD passes, and we beat Philly for the first playoff win since the Frank Gifford days, and it's mass hysteria!!
Yea, the Giants lose the following week to the eventual SB champ 49ers, but the G-Men didn't back down an inch and played them tough all day.
Everything was different after 1981. Every. Damn. Thing. was different.
I thought the Giants were already using the 3-4 starting in 1979. There’s a book I have indicating they were.
I felt good about the exam, and then we pulled off the impossible and beat the Cowboys.
I ended up doing well on the exam, and it started me on a trajectory to medical school. And the Giants would go onto their own great trajectory.
That day changed my life!
When Hunt intercepted that pass I jumped with my fists up, but I was too exuberant and hit the ceiling with my fists. My knuckles were bleeding profusely and I had bits of stucco embedded in them. I wrapped my hands in a dish towel and refused to stop watching until Danelo hit that FG.
It was. Not a fake like we’ve had since but redemption that our team in blue was no longer a laughing stock and would be a legitimate challenger for sometime to come.
Maybe that’s where we are today, but let’s see it on the field this season.
Ha ha, I was at a wedding that day too. It was my job to get the score. Had to run out to the car to get the radio on immediately after the wedding.
Speaking of whispering the score, Christmas Eve Mass 2011 was Jets-Giants Victor Cruz 99 yd TD. You could hear that one being passed around LOL.
I was at the Dallas game in December, if there ever was a more improbable win for the Giants, I've not seen it. That Dallas team was loaded and primed for a Super Bowl run, but the Giants played their hearts out. The Wild Card win at Philadelphia the next week felt like a Super Bowl championship. A whole generation of football fans witnessed Giants post-season success for the first time.
There had even been talk of a NY-NY Super Bowl as the Jets had made the playoffs for the first time in a decade, the hype made it a special time to be a football fan in NY after the dreadful 1970s.
That said, the stretch run in 1981 was a fun ride, from the Perry Williams interception all the way to the end.