The Draw Play

Over the past 15 years as the Giants fell from Super Bowl winners to laughing stock I had an interesting experience of watching the fandom change, myself included. This sort of went along with simply learning more and more about the sport as time moved on. Teams go bad, and you can often spot how much ball someone knows by who they bame for it. At first the blame for the increasing failures was on the players. This is pretty common for newbies to the sport who don’t really know anyone but the players. You blame the people who very visibly mess up on the field of play. The QB who threw bad passes, the kicker who shanked the kicks, the loud annoying diva WR.

Pretty soon though you learn to blame the coach. Usually the head coach first. Every decision made on the field must run through him of course. If the coach has some level of pedigree, like Coughlin did, the next hot thing is to start going after the coordinators. It’s Kevin Gilbride’s fault, etc. His system is bad, etc. Sometimes more in-depth blame will even be thrown at smaller coaches, like Strength and Conditioning coaches when your team has injury problems.

But after that the shit rolls uphill to the GM. The coach can’t win with bad players! The GM keeps getting bad players! We cant win with these cats!

But after a time, when your team has hired and fired multiple coaches, GMs, players, do you really have it hit home where the problem lies. It lies with the people who can’t lose their job. Ownership. Every bad coach the Giants have hired? Every GM? Decisions made starting with the Maras. And when you realize that, it gets pretty depressing. You realize your invested happiness is dependent on some extremely rich dipshit either making a rare pile of good decisions or them hiring people smart enough to counter their decisions. Maybe your team is held hostage by a disinterested investor type who just wanted the financial portfolio boost of a sports team, or a meddling nincompoop who thinks because he was successful in one field he understands this other one. I’ve watched the Giants fandom turn on Mara/Tisch, and they’ve been right to do so. Of course with that pivot comes the sadness that it’s going to take an earthquake to get this franchise repositioned correctly because it’s the foundation that needs fixing.

It was fun to see the Bills fandom speedrun this in real time with the McDermott debacle. Bills fans, having spent years moping in sadness, suddenly had something worth rooting for. Almost as quickly as they rose, I started seeing a ton of blame being thrown at McDermott for not pulling them over the finish line. Ever since the 13 seconds game (When they lost a heartbreaker to the best team in football, who was beating everybody) they have thrown so much blame at McDermott’s feet. In my opinion, too much. It wasn’t until this recent season when it felt like GM Brandon Beane was starting to get his fair share of the blame as the fans could see the roster deteriorate and understand it wasn’t all on McDermott. Then McDermott gets axed, Beane gets promoted, and it was like so much of the fandom finally realized what their Sabers fan friends already knew: Terry Pegula is a numbskull. This isn’t going to get fixed, is it. This is likely going to get worse.

Then of course we have Green Bay, who are mostly stuck blaming the coaching staff and GM because they don’t actually have any power or influence despite what the little sheet of paper they have says. They still have the best form of ownership though, so they can stay smug about that I guess. We should all strive to be the Packers, because when Giants fans own the Giants, I can then directly blame Frankie in Hoboken for the shanked kicks. Fuck that guy.