Big Blue View
New York Giants fans overwhelmingly love the team’s decision to hire John Harbaugh as head coach. That is reflected in a poll here at Big Blue View in which 95.2% of respondents (5,227 of 5,490) said the hiring of Harbaugh was the right decision.
The move has been nearly universally praised. Dan Duggan of The Athletic wrote that “Landing Harbaugh is like hitting the inside straight the Giants have been chasing all these years.”
There are, though, always naysayers. Always doubters. Always people who look for reasons why things won’t work out.
Are there valid reasons to doubt the Harbaugh hire?
Sure. Nothing is ever guaranteed. Having success in one place does not mean you will definitely have success in another.
So, let’s give the doubters their due.
I received an e-mail to the Big Blue View mailbag inbox from Daniel Selz. It’s really too long for a mailbag question, but is worth discussing. Daniel’s letter reads:
One of the things I admire about your work at BBV is your generally even-keeled takes, not getting too high or too low, not getting caught up in the hyperbole of the ‘hot take machine’.
Then this morning I read in your piece, ‘has there ever been a bigger, more stunning, more potentially franchise-altering move than this one by a New York team?’ And I don’t want to just single you out, everyone on the Internet seems sure this is the best, most amazing move in the history of sports and maybe everything.
For fun as a thought experiment, I had Google Gemini help me compile the following table comparing Harbaugh to ‘Mystery Coach A’:
Can you guess who Mystery Coach A is? What if I tell you, like Harbaugh, he was also fired from his first head coaching gig for friction with his two-time MVP quarterback who wore number 8…
Mystery Coach A is Mike McCarthy! And just as a thought experiment, let’s say the Giants were hiring Mike McCarthy right now, after whiffing on Harbaugh and Stefanski…it’s hard to imagine everyone and their mother would be saying hyperbolic things about this being the best moment in the history of their giant fandom.
What gives? My point isn’t to claim we should have hired McCarthy or that i would have been excited about that, I’m just trying to understand what is driving such a difference in ‘vibes’ about Harbaugh vs. McCarthy, since the underlying key data about each’s performance seems shockingly similar (if anything–gasp!–you could look at the bottom two rows and have a preference for McCarthy right?)?
One last question in the spirit of being a wet-blanket…in your opinion or based on what you’ve heard, what are Harbaugh’s weaknesses or shortcomings that need to fixed that led to him being fired from his last job? As a Giants fan of a certain age, it’s impossible not to remember the narrative...
