Big Blue View
Let’s go back to 1983 and judge Young the same way we are now judging Joe Schoen
At Joe Schoen’s bye week presser he answered affirmatively when asked if he expected to be brought back next season. He also claimed “We’re not far off”.
Giants’ Twitter and several of the Giants’ beat writers have been, shall we say, skeptical of these answers. Ed Valentine polled the Big Blue View community on the first of these questions and got a solid if not landslide endorsement of Schoen from you:
As bad as some of you think you have it being Giants fans right now, I and those of you similar to my age know that the current dry spell is nothing compared to the wilderness years of 1964-1980, when the Giants had zero playoff appearances and only two seasons with a winning record. If you’re old enough to remember that era, you’ll remember something else: The Giants hired a new general manager in 1979, George Young, and Young got the Giants to the playoffs in his third season as GM...only to have the team collapse the two seasons after that when Bill Parcells took over for Ray Perkins as head coach.
Young’s scorecard after 5 seasons as GM: 1 playoff appearance (and 1 playoff win), and records of 6-10, 4-12, 9-7, 4-5 (a strike-shortened season), and 3-12-1. Young almost fired Parcells after one season (1982) and replaced him with Howard Schnellenberger but in the end decided not to. I don’t remember if Young himself was in danger of being shown the door, but if these questions are being asked of Schoen, surely it would have been fair to ask them of Young.
We all know how the story ends: Playoffs in 1984 and 1985, and a Super Bowl ring in 1986. Did George Young think the Giants were not far off in 1983? How far off were they, actually, and how did they get from there to a title?
Here’s a table showing the Giants’ starters (data courtesy of Pro Football Reference) for 1978, their last season under GM (actually “Director of Operations”) Andy Robustelli and head coach John McVay (grandfather of Sean), and for every subsequent season up to 1986:
Unless you want to take a stroll down memory lane, most of the names in the table are irrelevant to the discussion. The purpose is to identify how the 1986 Super Bowl champion Giants were built, and how long it took. Toward that end, the starters on that team (far right column) are color-coded in red in the year in which they first became starters for the Giants. Some of the salient points are:
