Pat’s Pick: Get the Medal for Trying Ready

EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ – The great Bill Parcells once said there are no medals for trying.

His point when it came to football games, was well taken. You either win, or you lose, and there’s no in-between, nor are there points for doing mostly everything right in terms of playing a crisp and competitive football game only to come out with a big fat “L” at the end of the day.

But this Giants franchise has fallen off a long way from when Parcells prowled the sideline. Sure there were spurts of glory in the years to follow, but if we’re talking the last decade, well, that’s quite another story.

I won’t go into the reasons why the Giants, once a perennial powerhouse that between 2000-11 made seven playoff appearances and won two out of three Super Bowls trips, got to this point as by now, the sad story has been reiterated a million times.

While nothing has changed from the Parcells days as far as teams receiving a consolation prize, if they lose, let’s put the 2020 New York Giants team and where they stand into perspective.

This is a team that general manager Dave Gettleman took a sledgehammer to from the minute he walked in the door in late 2018, starting with clearing out all those bloated contracts on the mulligans brought in to cover for blown draft picks.

(Only four draft picks from the Jerry Reese era remain.

This team has mostly been formed according to the vision of head coach Joe Judge and his staff, who realize that they have stepped into a franchise that has underperformed and underwhelmed for most of the past decade.

Judge has been determined to change that right from Day 1. “We’re working to build a tough, smart, fundamentally sound football team,” he said recently.

“That’s where our emphasis is going to lie and that’s where we’re going to consistently work towards getting to. There’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of urgency in what we’re preparing to do, and we’re going to go out there and work to make the area proud.”

The Fighting Joe Judges, a team that Judge has meticulously tried to mold into his vision of what a winning program should look like, are going to get their first test against a very tough Pittsburgh Steelers team Monday Night.

And let’s be honest. Not many people outside of 1925 Giants Drive—including yours truly—are expecting the Giants to win this game, not considering the Giants have been rebuild literally from the ground up and are going against a team that has the majority of its pillars in place.

If that happens, it won’t be the end of the world, not so long as the Giants show that they’re finally able to put something on the field that doesn’t resemble the Keystone Cops routines we’ve seen at times in the past.

A solidly played football game will build confidence for the weeks ahead—remember how Tom Coughlin’s Giants stood toe-to-toe against the New England Patriots in 2007 in a game that didn’t matter for either team? That Giants team lost that game—barely—but the experience and momentum they gained were enough to propel them to the top of the NFL’s mountain.

The same can happen Monday night if the Giants can show themselves capable of standing toe-to-toe with a more established Steelers team.