If you’ve spent five minutes in the presence of John Mara, then you know how much these 10 words had to wound him. He not only understands the Giants’ place of prominence within both the NFL community and that of Greater New York, he knows precisely why his football team resides in those rarefied precincts.
The Maras have always accepted — indeed, they’ve welcomed — a mantra taught in their catechism classes that just as easily applied to their football Sunday endeavors: To whom much is given, much is expected.
And Mara knows that equation has been lacking.
“Let’s be honest,” the owner of the Giants said Tuesday morning, when it became official the team was saying goodbye to Tom Coughlin and hello to at least another couple of years of Jerry Reese, “we’ve lost some credibility as an organization.”
Ten words that cut right to the truth of what presently ails the Giants, that had to cut like a razor blade to Mara’s veins and arteries. Mara, like his father before him, has always understood the deal, especially in New York. Losing is fair game: If we put out a substandard product, yell and scream all you like.
But trust us that we know what we’re doing.
With those 10 words, Mara made it perfectly clear: He, the Giants’ No. 1 fan, isn’t sold that the franchise knows what it’s doing right now.
So how can anyone else?
“When you have three losing years in a row like that, you face a lot of criticism,” Mara said. “A lot of it is deserved. It’s up to us now to turn that around and get back to where I think we should be.”
If Tuesday was supposed to be that starting point, it is hard to believe Mara was any more confident in where his team is headed when he went to bed than he was when his alarm clock went off in the morning.
First there was Coughlin’s fire-and-brimstone farewell, in which he managed to channel both Patton (“We have an obligation to teach these young men the lessons, the principles and the life skills that they will need once their professional careers are over!”) and Dear Abby (“Eli, it’s not you,” he said, looking right at his stricken quarterback, “it’s not you. It’s us. We win, we lose together.”) with a little Friars Club wiseguy sprinkled in (“They don’t panic every time there’s a missed third down,” he said of his bosses, “just after you go 6-10 twice.”).
And that was the easy part; Coughlin’s work here will land him in Canton eventually, but one of his old bosses was the one who forever burdened coaches with his axiom about being what your record says you are, and the record over the last three years is 19-29. This may have been an unfortunate parting, but it is not an unfair one.
What followed is what should give Mara heartburn, because not 15 minutes after Mara did the unthinkable and questioned the very viability of his operation — which, by itself, was a study in accountability and should have provided hope that its credibility is merely temporarily absent, not lost — his general manager took to the podium.
And heel-crushed the very notion of accountability.
It started off well, Reese actually saying this: “I’ll take full responsibility.”
But in the next sentence — seriously, THE VERY NEXT SENTENCE — he added this:
“Even though everybody’s involved with grading players, the players that we take, I don’t try to have full control of everything. Our coaching staff is involved, our personnel staff is involved, everybody’s involved.”
In other words: I’m responsible. But don’t blame me.
Beautiful. After both Coughlin and Mara had drawn up blueprints for precisely how to handle a day like this one, Reese took a Zippo lighter out of his pocket and torched those plans. And made you wonder if the franchise’s credibility might not actually be on a long, extended sabbatical.
And the thing is: Mara already was bucking history by deciding to go with the decidedly half-measure move of firing only his coach and not his GM, too. Forget how awful things went for the Jets when they went the other way not long ago, hiring John Idzik while also retaining Rex Ryan.
More relevant may be what the Mets did in 2002, when they fired Bobby Valentine as manager but opted to retain GM Steve Phillps, a transaction as mystifying now as it was then which, according to the deposed manager, went down something like this: “Fred [Wilpon] told me I was fired and I said, ‘What, and Steve stays?’ ”
All across the places in football New York tinted blue Tuesday, you heard a similar sentiment echoing through the faithful, and not without merit.
What, and Jerry stays?