Here is what Giants fans will be seeing on Sunday when the Patriots play the Texans in one playoff game and the Bears play the Rams in another:
They’ll be seeing exactly what they want their future to be, maybe even as soon as next season.
The Patriots have made it to a game like this, one win away from a conference championship game, because of what Mike Vrabel has done with Drake Maye in Vrabel’s first season with the Patriots and Maye’s second. And why have the Bears made it this far? Because of what Ben Johnson has done in his first year in Chicago, the work he’s done with Caleb Williams in Williams’ second year in pro football.
That is what Giants fans want from John Harbaugh. That’s their dream. They imagine Harbaugh — in his first year coaching their team — getting results like that from Jaxson Dart, maybe even in Dart’s second season in pro football. Maybe it’s a crazy dream. But Giants fans are allowed to have it right now, after what felt like the best week they’ve had in a very long time. It feels now like they ended with a three-game winning streak and not just two.
Was Harbaugh the only good choice for the Giants, with as many options there are in this coaching cycle? Of course not. If they hadn’t closed the deal with Harbaugh as quickly as they did, and he had decided to go somewhere else, maybe they could have pivoted to Kevin Stefanski, twice a Coach of the Year in Cleveland.
Did John Harbaugh win a Super Bowl once with Joe Flacco as his quarterback? He sure did, beating his brother Jim in New Orleans. But you know what Stefanski did while he was still with the Browns? He coached the Browns into the playoffs a couple of years ago when Flacco was 38, a season that started with him on his couch in New Jersey.
So obviously there were — and are — other candidates out there for the Giants. But they absolutely had to hire Harbaugh, not just for his name and his resume and what Bill Parcells would describe as that Super Bowl pelt on the wall, but for this more than anything else:
Hiring him made the Giants credible again, at the moment he agreed to take the job. They had to hire Harbaugh for the same reason the Broncos had to hire Sean Payton. The Broncos, even though they had won a Super Bowl more recently than the Giants have, had lost their way, same as the Giants have. Then Payton, who won his Super Bowl when he was coaching the Saints, arrived and made them legit again. During this regular season they were more than that, ending up with the No. 1 seed in the AFC behind their own second-year quarterback, Bo Nix. Maybe you are spotting some kind of through line here with young quarterbacks, and the guys coaching them up. And the possibilities.
Payton is a veteran and Vrabel is a veteran. Harbaugh is a veteran of 18 seasons coaching the Ravens. Johnson is the newbie here. But Johnson — even acting as if he invented football — got the same results out of the kid for whom he’s calling the signals in Chicago as Vrabel has gotten with Maye in New England. You hear all the time about how this coach or that coach is going to change a culture. Aaron Glenn was going to change the culture with the Jets, we started hearing that on the day he was hired before the Jets turned into something no better than an expansion franchise. Now Glenn might already be gone if he weren’t a newbie. But you better believe he’d like to have tried things this season with someone like Drake Maye as his quarterback, or Caleb Williams, or Bo Nix.
Or even Jaxson Dart, the hot kid with whom the Jets share MetLife Stadium, and with whom Harbaugh will start taking his swings next season, which suddenly can’t start soon enough for Giants fans.
Is Dart a sure thing? He’s not. Neither is the new coach, despite the way all Giants fans want to carry him around the room. Harbaugh did win that one Super Bowl over the 49ers, you bet, on a famous football night when the lights briefly went out at the Superdome. But this is how close he came to losing that game:
A ball in the air from Colin Kapernick to Michael Crabtree in the end zone near the end, fourth-and-goal from the 5-yard line, a pass to the back of the end zone that would have won the game for the Niners. It fell incomplete. Ravens 34, 49ers 31.
And John Harbaugh’s Ravens never made it back to the Super Bowl, even with Harbaugh coaching a young MVP quarterback like Lamar Jackson in his prime. It’s one thing not to have been able to get past Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. No shame in that, or losing to Josh Allen. But over the past several years, the Ravens have blown a frightening number of leads in the fourth quarter. Those are, by the way, the kinds of blown fourth-quarter leads that helped get Brian Daboll fired this year.
Guess what? Even the immortals have holes in resumes far better than Harbaugh’s, including Bill Belichick and Andy Reid, in January and even in February. But you know all Giants fans want at this point, after what the last several years have been like? They just want to play in the kinds of postseason games that Harbaugh’s Ravens did year after year, even across all the years when they didn’t make it back to the Super Bowl.
Harbaugh didn’t make the playoffs this time and got fired. His team started out 1-5 and still had a chance on the last night of the regular season to win its division. Then a young kicker missed a kick and it was over for him in Baltimore, even if the official announcement would come later from Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, who talked about how difficult the firing was for him.
“I just hope you respect me enough to know that 100 percent my instincts told me this was the time,” Bisciotti said. “And I may be right, I may be wrong, but I did it because I’m in charge of doing it.”
After that there was no question, none, nothing to think about, as Giants ownership went hard and fast after Harbaugh and closed out the competition, essentially in one day. Now that they have him, though, there are still no guarantees, even with the biggest guys. Parcells never won another Super Bowl after leaving the Giants, even if his Patriots played in one. Jimmy Johnson didn’t win with the Dolphins.
Harbaugh gets his own shot with the Giants now. His second chance. His second-year quarterback. That’s the blueprint. Big Blueprint.
JUDGE’S DEAL A BARGAIN, IT’S ALWAYS TOWNS’ FAULT & DRURY NEEDS TO STOP WRITING LETTERS …
It is worth repeating, the way money got thrown around in baseball this week, that Aaron Judge’s original $360 million contract with the Yankees is one of the great bargains in the history of baseball.
Seriously, if Kyle Tucker is worth $60 million a year to somebody after the career he’s had so far, what in the world would Judge be worth if he were hitting the open market right now?
Incidentally:
Fun fact: Tucker went to Plant High in Tampa the same as Pete Alonso did.
Alonso’s still the Plant High grad onto whom the firm of Cohen and Stearns should have held on to.
I don’t want to make too fine a point of things — and I’m happy the Mets got Bo Bichette after getting pantsed by the Dodgers again on Tucker — but since Bichette has never really played third base, where are we exactly with the whole run prevention thing from David Stearns?
Same deal with Jorge Polanco over there on the other side of the diamond, since he’s only played first base for about five minutes with his career.
At least Uncle Steve has the good grace not to complain about the way the Dodgers spend money.
And when the sport gets shut down after next season while owner and players fight over a salary cap, it will be kind of fun seeing where the owner of the Mets lines up on all that.
One more thing about Bichette the Met:
Can he pitch, too?
Isn’t St. John’s getting rid of its basketball general manager the equivalent of a pitching coach getting fired in baseball?
It remains fascinating that every time the Knicks lose a game — and after they lost to the Warriors Thursday night they were closer to the No. 8 Heat in the conference than to the No. 1 Pistons — it seems to be Karl-Anthony Towns’ fault.
And why I’ll believe it’s not some crazy thought that they might try to move him at the deadline.
Things are pretty much his fault the way they used to be Julius Randle’s before Julius got shipped out of town.
I consider myself a glass-half-full guy, always have, always will, but I just don’t frankly think Chris Drury sending out a letter to Rangers’ fans about a “retool” at this point in the season is a good thing.
Do you?
Imagine how proud Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite would be seeing the retooled CBS Evening News — see what I did there? — turned into this kind of pep rally.
I still think Bichette would have made a better Yankee than Met.
Hey, I like basketball and Timothee Chalamet clearly likes basketball, so we’ve got that in common.
But if he wins the Academy Award for “Marty Supreme” do you suppose I could get him to hand over his Oscar?
Sure, it’s not the Nobel Prize.
It would still look really cool on my mantle.
