PROMOTING PARCELLS

The Giants entered 1982 heading in the right direction. They had made the playoffs the year before, marking their first winning season since 1972 and first postseason appearance since 1963. They had a quarterback (two of them actually), they had the reigning Defensive Rookie of the Year, and, most importantly, they had the coach they thought could bring them a championship.

They even gave that coach a three-year extension prior to the 1982 season, setting the course for success.

Ray Perkins was the coach that George Young hired to whip the Giants into shape when he took over in 1979. “He will make it very uncomfortable downstairs for them to lose” is what Young told the Maras of his choice.

He was right.

“When Perkins took over it was sort of a rude awakening for everybody because he was a different kind of coach.” Harry Carson said. “He wasn’t about smiling and trying to make players happy and all of that stuff. He was a hard-ass coach who really got on your ass.”

It wasn’t just the players, it was the assistant coaches, as well. He would walk into the meeting rooms where everyone was talking and just stand there until everybody quieted down, commanding attention without ever saying a word.

“He gave this look like: ‘I’m the new sheriff in town, don’t fuck with me,’” Carson said. “When he took over he brought a different mind-set and a different attitude. He basically reinstilled a sense of discipline into the team. He was hard. He was fair, but he was really hard.”

And he was successful.

But two things happened during that 1982 season that no one anticipated. The first was the player’s strike, which lasted 57 days and reduced the schedule to nine games. That business had interfered with football was hard for Perkins to reconcile, and he grew frustrated by skewed priorities of the pro game. The second was Bear Bryant’s retirement as head coach at the University of Alabama, where Perkins had played under the legendary college coach. So, when Perkins was approached to be named Bryant’s successor, he jumped at the opportunity for what he considered his dream job.

Not only did that leave the Giants in a lurch without their head coach heading into the 1983 season, it left them in a strange limbo with a lame-duck head coach for the final three games of the 1982 season. Had they won all three, they would have made the playoffs, but just a few days after Perkins had made his announcement, the Giants lost to the Redskins, 15–14, in Washington.

In the course of one season, they went from championship aspirations to getting dumped by a head coach for a college gig.

“It was a setback,” John Mara said.

The Giants felt they needed to name Perkins’s replacement quickly. Having Perkins coach out the remainder of the season without the players or fans knowing what their future would hold made for an uncomfortable situation. The problem was, all the good candidates were already working for other teams. If the Giants wanted to maintain some sense of continuity in what they were building—and hire a new head coach before the 1982 season was officially over—they had to pluck someone from Perkins’s staff.

As Young went down the list of assistants on the Giants, there were several candidates. Almost none of them had what Young was looking for, though: previous head coaching experience. There was one guy, however, who had been the head coach for one season at the Air Force Academy. Bill Parcells.

“I think he’s got a little something to him,” Young told the Maras.

So, they decided to offer him the job,

On December 15, 1982, Perkins held a press conference announcing he was taking the Alabama job. Prior to that, he had gathered his coaching staff and told them of his plans.

Parcells, who had run the defense that had led the Giants to their first licks of success, knew that meant one of two things. Either he would be named to replace Perkins, or he would be out of a job.

The day of the Perkins press conference, Young asked Parcells to come to his office for a conversation. Parcells thought he knew what it was about, but Young didn’t come right out with it. First, he praised Parcells for the work he had done with the defense. Then he talked about wanting continuity after Perkins. Parcells sat there listening and nodding, but in his mind, he was thinking: “Get on with it!” Was Young buttering him up for bad news?

Finally, Young made the offer.

“Do you want the job?”

Parcells didn’t bother to consider the question.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. They shook hands.

Perkins finished the 1982 season, in part to give Parcells a fresh start in 1983. Parcells didn’t do much to take advantage of it.

One of his first decisions was to bench Phil Simms at quarterback. Simms wound up injured that year, too. Then the other injuries began. Harry Carson was hurt, and the Giants moved Lawrence Taylor to middle linebacker. The Giants lost a 10–6 game to the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, which some people still believe is the worst game ever played on that prime-time vehicle. They finished the season 3–12–1. It felt as if Parcells had set the team back a decade.

Parcells tried to be a head coach the way he was a defensive coordinator, by joking around with and enjoying his players. That worked in a small group of men, and it worked with Perkins above him cracking the whip on all of them. But when he tried the tactic as the head honcho, it blew up on him.

“A lot of players knew him as the defensive coordinator, and that’s a whole lot different than how you look upon a head coach,” Simms said. “Hey, look, there were a lot of problems in ’83, but that was a little bit of it, too. When you become the head coach you’re a different person. It’s like the difference between how I treat my brother and how I treat my father. I treat my father, of course, a lot different than I treat my brother. I think you need that. There has to be a definite separation between player and coach when you talk about the head coach.”

Young started to second-guess his choice and wanted to replace Parcells after just one season. He tried to quietly pursue Howard Schnellenberger, the head coach at the University of Miami, but came back from a conversation with him telling the Maras: “I don’t think I can get him this year, but I think I can get him next year. Let’s give Parcells another chance.”

Looking back, John Mara said, “It would have been unfair to have fired [Parcells] back then because he had almost no chance with all those guys getting hurt in his first year as an NFL head coach.”

Fair or not, it was a strong consideration, and had Schnellenberger wanted the Giants’ job in 1984, he would have had it.

Meanwhile, word got back to Parcells that Young was looking to replace him. Parcells and Schnellenberger shared an agent, so it was hard for the Giants to keep that information away from him. That created a personal tension between Parcells and his general manager that would linger for the rest of their careers. But it also made Parcells examine his own choices.

“He tried to treat the guys on the team like men, and that turned around and bit him in the ass,” Carson said of the 1983 season. “So when we did not perform to his expectations and George Young was on the verge of firing him, basically he said, ‘I’m gonna do things my way. If I survive this, I’m gonna do things my way.’”

When he showed up for the start of the 1984 season, Parcells knew it was a make-or-break year. First, he changed the roster. He got rid of Brad Van Pelt and Brian Kelley, drafted Carl Banks, and signed Gary Reasons.

“He revamped the defense,” Carson said. “He got younger players who didn’t have bad habits off the field.”

But he also changed himself.

“He was a different guy in training camp that year in ’84,” Simms said. “Very assertive. He became the guy we see now. Loud, opinionated, and it was quite a difference, that’s for sure.”

“Prior to that, he had been a guy who was pretty approachable, pretty friendly, pretty personable,” John Mara said. “He changed, and I think he would admit that, because he almost got fired. But we make the playoffs in ’84, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

The Giants almost fired Bill Parcells after his first season as head coach. He wound up changing his style, winning two Super Bowls, and being enshrined in the Hall of Fame. (Jerry Pinkus)

Parcells coached the Giants to the playoffs in 1984 and 1985, then to their first Super Bowl title in 1986. After a 6–9 record in 1987, the Giants won 10 games but missed out on the postseason in 1988. They went 12–4 in 1989, losing to the Rams in a home playoff game, and in 1990 won their second Super Bowl with Parcells in charge.

Perkins’s departure, seen as a black eye at the time, wound up begetting a Hall of Fame coach for the Giants. But did the Giants need to make the move from Perkins to Parcells in order to win? Might they have hoisted the same two Lombardi Trophies—or more? or earlier?—if Perkins had stayed?

“Possibly,” Carson said. “We were on the right track. But there were some guys on the team who were sort of on their last legs, and when we went 3–12–1, you could see that there were certain players who didn’t necessarily want to do things the way Parcells wanted things done. If Perkins had stayed and been our head coach and Parcells was defensive coordinator, who knows where Bill Belichick would be now? Who knows where Bill Parcells would be now? But Ray Perkins probably would have won a Super Bowl.”

And he might have done it without Phil Simms at quarterback. Perkins was an advocate for Scott Brunner, who had brought him to his only playoff game in 1981, and was ready to stick with Brunner at quarterback in 1982 before Simms got hurt and the decision was moot.

That’s why Simms says the thing that saved his career was the miserable 3–12–1 record in Parcells’s rookie season and the fact that he had been hurt, so the stench of that losing did not stick to him.

“The team was a little bit in disarray, and it helped pave the way to give me another shot to go ahead and play the following year,” he said. “After ’83, they definitely cleaned it out and changed the team dramatically. Older players were let go, they brought in new people. We changed a lot going into 1984. We had to.”

Parcells had to, too.

When he did, he became a legend.