How do you remember the Fassel era?

but I always felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Never trusted his teams.

But the teams were erratic. Serous lack of consistency. That reflected the coach himself.

No one gave us a shot against the Viking.

Chris Carter and Randy Moss were intolerable

Unfortunately after that 49ers loss in the playoffs he couldn’t recover. His decision making seemed to be playing scared.

I think he got a raw deal after leaving the Giants. He was worthy of another shot at HC.

In comment 16388548 bceagle05 said:

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but I always felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Never trusted his teams.

I agree with him his 100%.

The expectation to lose was so ingrained in me that, when Super Bowl 46 rolled around, I was stupefied by the fact that I actually expected to win that game. It was such a foreign sensation!

Went to a Super Bowl unexpectedly . Got our Asses kicked in embarrassing fashion. But overall his time wasn't the worse of my fandom. No where near in fact.

...oddly this information came later but rumor has it Parcells was thinking of coming back to the Giants. Wellington called the hotel where Young or Accorsi were meeting with Fassel and had already offered him the position.

97 was a fun season. 2000 was, of course, unreal. I wasn't a season ticket holder but was lucky enough to attend the Eagles and Vikings games. 2002 and Jeremey Shockey's rookie season.

You guys are right that SF game was likely the death blow but I always thought that Monday Night Game against Parcells and Dallas where they took the lead and then the kickoff out of bounds was the game. Even though they won a couple of games after.

recent eras, for sure.

but the Vikings game was brutal. I don’t blame him for the SB. NO ONE was going to beat the Ravens that year

Except Fassell. My dad didn’t like him lol at all.

I thought he was a good coach. Some of his teams had good pieces

And John Fox were a good combo. We had some good pieces. He had some bad in game decision making but overall gave us some fun years.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he had more losses as the -4.5 favorite than any Giant coach. He could never consistently get the team that would show up to beat the great teams to show up and beat lesser competition.

I wanted him out years before

Fassel ended the offensive futility of the mid-90s.

His teams always beat up divisional opponents for the most part.

Always played their best football in December.

It always sucks to lose a Super Bowl, but the 2000 Ravens place in NFL history tells me the better team won that day and that not a whole was going to be done to change that outcome. I do think things maybe snowballed a little bit and the score could’ve been a lot closer but I’m thinking a solid 8 out of 10 times that Raven team would come out on top in that matchup.

The other 2 playoff losses we can definitely quibble about. We had not business losing 97 or 02 when we did, but again, fun to my head I don’t think we’re talking Super Bowl teams there.

The Fassel years were just a good, solid yet unspectacular era of Giants football. Definitely lots of excitement.

My first year up at Albany while my old man and I were walking around UAlbany campus and one of the first things we stumbled upon was a softball game with all the beat writers and journalists. Fassel and Bob Tisch (both fine now) were sitting on a golf cart watching and they were really cool to me. Chatted for a couple of minutes and signed my hat.

(Both gone now) obviously

that was fun to watch, that ended with a gut wrenching choke job in the playoffs.

Kinda encapsulates his entire tenure, lot of unexpected wins and fun moments, and a lot of brutal choke jobs

But in retrospect

What would we give to have a coach make the playoffs 3 out of their first 6 years including a SB and the other seasons be 8-8 or 7-9.

Same with Coughlin.

We thought their bad years were bad

Little dud we know what bad was….

Lombardies.

Prior to 2003, his worst season was 7-9. He got the Giants to a Super Bowl with Kerry Collins at QB.

Time has made the Fassel era look much better considering the last decade.

If you read some of the posts by our resident clown, the high water mark recently was the Gettleman years. Under that lense, Fassel was a veritable Don Shula.

It’s was a comparative golden age of giants football

getting a real QB helped him go even further but always one thread away from unraveling.

Everything else is a blur and barely remmeber any of it. Including the beat down we gave Minny.

That SF game ruined any productivity I jad in me for a week.

I worked at a Starbucks in college and I remmeber being on the espresso bar the next day making drinks. When I heard someone on the line to order talking about the game, I was straming a pitcher of milk for cappuccinos. I started staring into space contemplating how on Earth that could have happened and burned my jand because the milk was boiling over about 35 degrees anove foaming tenp and shooting hot milk all over the place.

It was embarassing, but also the truest example of being in a state of shock that I can fathom.

but he looks like prime Belichick compared to what we’ve seen most of the past decade. I agree that his teams regularly played down to the competition, but he put together some good seasons. Won a division title with Danny Freaking Kanell as his QB.

His teams are good but very undisciplined. The Viking and SF playoff losses were prime examples of that.

Got to watch that team pummel the falcons down here in Georgia.

It was fun. Didn't feel like watching them play was some kind of punishment, like these days.

I am extremely positive on his tenure since he was the coach for my entire high school time into college.

Before that I went through the end of elementary school and all of middle school with the inept offenses of Dan Reeves and being subjected to QB play of Dave Brown. I HATED Dan Reeves, partly because he was so conservative and also because he never so much tried to trust his QBs. The offensive output was putrid.

By comparison I was excited that this seeming Bill Gates-esque nerd who was some offensive savant and QB whisper was coming to New York. It was like Christ coming down to fix our embarrassing team at that point.

The highs were high and the lows were low but it was exciting football! Not boring dog shit. He revived the team, offense with Collins-Tiki-Amani-Ike-Shockey, had an eye for coaches with Payton and Fox and I think was a much better coach than given credit for.

I can write more about him, but I’ll stop there. I really enjoyed his stay especially after Reeves and was sad to see him go since he really was the first coach I truly liked. I was a tad young for the Parcells tenure.

Pretty accurately

I thought he lost the games he was expecting to lose and generally won the games he was expected to win. I dont think they won games because if his coaching. Probably he was an average coach even when the talent was above average

We met him in person as we came out of the bathroom at the end of practice. I was with my wife and two young kids, we wanted him to sign an autograph for the kids and all we had was a Mickey Mouse Disney book as we had just returned from there. We shared a laugh about that and he was great with the kids.

With Shockey dropping a decisive pass and then looking at his hands.

I’d take any of the teams he coached over what we have had in recent years. At least they were competitive.

Maddengily inconsistent

In comment 16388659 yalebowl said:

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With Shockey dropping a decisive pass and then looking at his hands.

That one where he changed his gloves and gave the finger.

Shockey was also awesome in that hame

In comment 16388572 Mayo2JZ said:

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but the Vikings game was brutal. I don’t blame him for the SB. NO ONE was going to beat the Ravens that year

I think they would have lost regardless, but I hated the gameplan they went in with for that SB.

.

Which O-line was worse Fassel's or today's ?

The Frisco debacle should haver never happened; Giants killed the Niners all day, then with lead, couldn't hold it because the line couldn't run to kill the clock.

O-line coach "Mouse" McNally tried hard with that bunch of impersonators, but just couldn't pull it off.

My last memory of Jim was his last game. He had so many players hurt, it seemed like he had to hire dog catchers to play for him. After he got fired, he still showed up in a Giants jacket, doing his best to win the game (and almost did, as I recall).

Great defenses, mostly meh offenses.

If I were a Steelers fan that would make him the worst coach.

As a Giants fan that makes him pretty darn good! Especially since the two better ones are or should be in the Hall of Fame.

He was a breath of fresh air after some pretty bad football. That first season, going perfect against the NFCE was awesome!

That sticks out is he came out the one year very aggressive. And the team failed him every time. It culminated with the pick 6 just before halftime vs the Cards (I think), but he was going in 4th, very much like today’s coaches but the team let him didn’t come through.

No one was beating that Ravens team. They knocked out or hurt every QB they faced and Collins was playing hurt by the 2nd half.

The way the Giants owned the Eagles during his era was a huge positive. The SB loss was against a lethal defence which was coached by a younger, less toxic Wink Matindale, and they had the murderer Ray Lewis to deal with.

and completely unpredictable. There were times when I'd thought he was brilliant, getting the team to play above their potential, and there were times they were maddeningly frustrating and - to borrow Fassels' term - befuddling.

One thing he was not was boring. Whether they were up or down, the Giants were always interesting under his watch.

In comment 16388693 NormanAllen_95 said:

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In comment 16388659 yalebowl said: Quote: With Shockey dropping a decisive pass and then looking at his hands. That one where he changed his gloves and gave the finger. Shockey was also awesome in that hame

Shockey cost them the game. he dropped a sure TD. maybe if he spent more time focused on his his job instead getting i fihhts with fans they would have been better off.

Fassel teams were incredibly undisciplined, just like him.

Wish I coulda shook his hand.

from them almost every year.
Prior to the total collapse in 2003 Fassel's December record was an impressive 19-7.
If he could have extracted that kind of record out of them from September through November he'd have been a legend.

a team that could consistently beat the Eagles!

But also as a coach who was in charge of wildly inconsistent teams, which was frustrating. At least he brought excitement back to a franchise that had become stale and boring during the Dan Reevs era. He also knew how to get the best out of Shockey. Couglin didn't like to feature the TE as the focal point of his offensive's by the time he got to the Giants-much to Shockey's chagrin. The two playoffs collapses in 97 and 02 stung a lot. The big loss in the SB sucked as well. But as I said, I give Fassel credit for bringing back excitement and making the team a contender for most of his tenure.

actually punched each other on the sideline during the game. This is totally unacceptable.

interesting trivia, Fassel was also on the sideline of the Stanford marching band debacle.

In comment 16388778 Victor in CT said:

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In comment 16388693 NormanAllen_95 said: Quote: In comment 16388659 yalebowl said: Quote: With Shockey dropping a decisive pass and then looking at his hands. That one where he changed his gloves and gave the finger. Shockey was also awesome in that hame Shockey cost them the game. he dropped a sure TD. maybe if he spent more time focused on his his job instead getting i fihhts with fans they would have been better off. Fassel teams were incredibly undisciplined, just like him.

Oh B.S. in a 38-14 game, one dropped TD pass shouldn't have mattered. The defense cost them the game for letting Jeff freaking Garcia look like Steve Young in the second half. Also, the ref screw job at the end.

In comment 16388771 Fishmanjim57 said:

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The way the Giants owned the Eagles during his era was a huge positive. The SB loss was against a lethal defence which was coached by a younger, less toxic Wink Matindale, and they had the murderer Ray Lewis to deal with.

What? Wink wasn't a coach on that Ravens team.

As a kid, I was a Giants fan in a school full of Cowboys and Niners fans. Fassel's era started off with the first team to ever go undefeated in the NFC East in '97, and the Fassel tenure coincided with the end of the Cowboys era of dominance. The 2000 Super Bowl run will always be among my best sports memories, as I was 6 when the Giants won SB25, so I had never seen them play at that level before. Obviously the result sucked in SB35, but winning the top seed, handily beating the Eagles and absolutely destroying the Vikings in the NFC Championship game were excellent memories.

My dad, on the other hand, was always frustrated by Fassel, to the point where he referred to him as "Fasshole" lol

played down to the level of the opponent constantly. Alot of big wins and good times too, but also often teams significantly overrated by NYG fans.