John Mara knows if he decides to fire Tom Coughlin, most of the paying customers will thank Coughlin for his service and willingly pat the old coach on the back as he heads out the door.
With blood already in the water, Mara also knows Giants loyalists will want to see general manager Jerry Reese thrown to the sharks as well, content to start anew without the two men who crafted the roster and prodded the players to two Super Bowl championships, two men at the helm of four consecutive non-playoff seasons.
Mara will not bow to public pressure but he will not hide from it, either. He has been down this road before, searching for reasons between Christmas and New Year’s to save Coughlin’s job, hoping he can muster enough optimism and hope for the future to sell it hard once another playoff-less season grinds to an end.
As a young man, Mara saw how his father, team patriarch Wellington Mara, stayed too long and with coaches and front-office personnel, based on what they accomplished for the Giants in the past, as if glorious achievement meant a lifetime pass. No one needs to fly a message from a plane telling John Mara loyalty can run its course. This was the one-more-chance year coming off a desultory 6-10 season filled with injuries and losing, and the Giants are 6-9 heading into their final game of a season filled with injuries and losing. If Mara gives the whole gang one more year after this, will anyone ever believe him if he says the sky is falling?
His desire is for continuity, to keep Coughlin coaching into his 70th birthday, to have a resurgent 2016 season and allow Coughlin to walk away hailed and not heckled. Mara will meet with co-owner Steve Tisch following the season, and they will formulate a plan. They could opt to keep Coughlin, saying this was an organizational failure and aggressive steps will be taken to right what has gone wrong, but not through mass firings. Mara would take plenty of flak for that, but he’s the boss and those who grumble are not likely to storm the gates of the team facility at the Meadowlands burning their season tickets.
There are no more stopgap changes to be made, not after Coughlin two years ago brought in a new offensive coordinator and last year hired a new defensive coordinator. It’s all or nothing this time, and Mara has to sense that. Those who believe Ben McAdoo was Mara’s hand-picked head coach in waiting, thrust upon a reluctant Coughlin, have it all wrong. Mara after the 2013 season did not know Ben McAdoo from Bob McAdoo. And for those who believe McAdoo is viewed “in the building’’ as some sort of coaching savant with star power as a head-coach prospect, pump the brakes on that. He is seen, as one Giants source put it, as “an outstanding young coach, period.’’
Of course there are fine, dedicated coaches working under Coughlin and that is the hard part when it comes to regime change. They all (or almost all) get thrown out with the bathwater. A new coach must be able to assemble his entire staff, without getting force-fed assistants already on the scene. If that means McAdoo is lost in the shake-up, so be it. Eli Manning at 35 years old does not need another new offense to learn, but finding a new head coach who wants to retain McAdoo will reduce the pool of attractive candidates.
With Reese, it gets trickier. A head coach has a win-loss record assigned to his name; a general manager does not. The Giants have not fired a general manager in 36 years, and it took five miserable seasons, culminating in “the Fumble’’ — perhaps the most infamous play in NFL history — to finally convince Wellington Mara to agree to dismiss franchise legend Andy Robustelli, ushering in the George Young era in 1979. Since then, it has been an orderly flow of succession: Young retired after the 1997 season and handed off to his assistant, Ernie Accorsi. Accorsi retired after the 2006 season — not before orchestrating the 2004 draft-day trade to acquire Manning — handing off to his top assistant, Reese.
There is no one to hand the job off to this time. Next in the chain of command is Chris Mara, the team’s senior vice president of player personnel, but there are not enough checks and balances when elevating a member of the Mara family into the general manager spot to make that move possible. How would Tisch fire a Mara? How would John Mara fire his younger brother?
Reese is expected to stay put, though the roster he gave Coughlin is lacking in so many places, it is difficult to tie up all the loose ends. Mara knows Reese’s résumé has two Super Bowls on it and appreciates the way Reese goes about his business, quietly, forcefully, never causing a ripple of controversy.
As talent-starved as the roster played out to be, Mara likely doesn’t see it from that prism. He also sees the Giants have 18 players on injured reserve — the highest total in the NFC, second in the league to the Ravens’ 21. There are some on the list — Victor Cruz, Will Beatty, Jon Beason, Johnathan Hankins, Geoff Schwartz, Larry Donnell, Daniel Fells, most recently Devon Kennard — all starters and the best at their positions, by a wide margin. Reese could not have been in South Florida back in the summer to tell Jason Pierre-Paul to grow up and quit lighting fireworks. Mara knows there has been too much bad luck but also that fans do not take kindly to such sob stories.
He does not want to fire Coughlin, but Mara likely knows he is going to have to do it.
There is no greater compliment for John Mara than hearing that he reminds those around him of his saintly father. Soon enough, though, John Mara is expected to take action.