The announcement was greeted with a shrug and a yawn: The New York Giants were elevating one of their coordinators, taking an obscure name and installing him in the most important job on one of the NFL’s foundation franchises.
“Always hire a guy you know,” George Young said on Dec. 15, 1982, and it was good that George Young knew who Bill Parcells was that day because outside of Oradell, N.J., there weren’t a whole lot of people, Giants fans or not, who could have picked Parcells out of a lineup.
“I learned a long time ago to evaluate the people around me for future reference,” Young said, explaining why he had selected Parcells, the Giants’ defensive coordinator for two years, on the same day Ray Perkins had informed him he was leaving the Giants to succeed Bear Bryant at Alabama.
“But picking a coach is like wives. You only get one pick. You can’t take two or three, unless you’re in Arabia.”
Well, let’s assume that Jerry Reese and John Mara aren’t going to get that colorful when they explain why they opted for Ben McAdoo to replace Tom Coughlin as the Giants’ new head coach after he spent two years as the team’s offensive coordinator.
But you can believe that they see in McAdoo a lot of the same things Young saw in Parcells some 33 years ago: A young, bright mind sure to be in demand at some point, who had paid his dues, who said all the right things while they were being evaluated. And you can believe a lot of Giants fans are greeting this announcement the way they did that one:
With a shrug. And a yawn.
This could be a terrific hire, of course. If you want to play the Parcells comparison out, it could be an epic hire. Of course, an important part of the Parcells mystique is remembering that after one year — a 3-12-1 calamity of a year — all the things Young had said about having a genuine sense that Parcells was his guy, of wanting to make sure no other team could get their hands on him, had vanished.
After 3-12-1, the job could have belonged to Howard Schnellenberger — very much the Urban Meyer/Nick Saban Hot College Coach of the Moment — if Schnellenberger had wanted the job. Even Parcells’ loudest champion, Young, was perfectly willing to make him walk a gangplank after 16 games.
Schnellenberger said thanks, but no thanks, and we know how that played out for Parcells, and for the Giants. But really, all that tale does is remind us of how little we know about Ben McAdoo, and what he is, and what he could be as a coach. If it is impossible to kill this hire, it is also impossible to praise it. Because we don’t know.
Because Reese doesn’t know.
And neither does Mara.
Nobody knows. And so we begin the Ben McAdoo era listening to smart people talk about what a bright offensive mind he is, and how players will take to him, and how he has all the tools to succeed, and win, and win big, and maybe he does. Bill Parcells did. Tom Coughlin was a coordinator once; he sure did, too.
Does Ben McAdoo?
Your guess is as good as mine, and as good as the general manager’s, and as good as the owner’s. Maybe, five years from now, we will talk about them being the smartest guys in the room, about how they identified the right guy from a list of intriguing guys. Maybe. But we don’t know. We can’t know. And neither can they. Not yet.