Whatever the Giants are going to be — and whether or not they can be what they once were — all begins on Saturday afternoon against the Vikings. Preseason game or not. This is where the John Harbaugh Era begins, with the new coach under more pressure on his way through the door as any Giants coach has ever faced.
There is pressure on all of them, of course, starting with the kid at quarterback, whose last name is Dart but who hasn’t been throwing a lot of those in training camp. There is always pressure on any Giants coach. Just never quite like this. It’s because of what they have become since the last Super Bowl the team won under Tom Coughlin, February of 2012. Now starting to feel to Giants fans as distant as the Battle of 1812.
Nobody knew very much about Bill Parcells on his way through the door. Even when Coughlin showed up, it had been just three years since the Giants had last been to a Super Bowl, losing badly to Harbaugh’s old team, the Ravens. This is different. Even though Brian Daboll took the Giants back to the postseason and became Coach of the Year in the process, the Giants have fallen down since, slogging their way to irrelevance.
They were 6-11 the year after the playoffs. They went to last place and 3-14 from there. Last place and 4-13 last season. In the lost years before Daboll’s rookie season, the record was 22-59. The Giants still mattered, and mightily, to their fans. Just not to anybody else. Then Harbaugh got fired in Baltimore and the Giants went after the coach as hard as he’s been coaching up his team in training camp.
Now here he is, with a 5-year contract worth $100 million and hoping, before it’s over, that he has become the first coach in history to win Super Bowls with two different teams. By the way? One of these days it’s going to happen. Maybe it can be in the Meadowlands. It was back in 1999, after the Mets had fallen behind the Braves 0-3 in the NLCS when Bobby Valentine was talking about how no baseball team in history had ever come all the way back from a deep, dark hole like that.
“Someday, somebody is gonna do it,” Bobby V. said, and five years later, the Boston Red Sox did.
Now Harbaugh is the one looking to do something that Parcells couldn’t do with a second team after already winning one Lombardi Trophy, something Mike Holmgren couldn’t do after he’d left Green Bay for Seattle. The road to him taking his shot really does begin at MetLife on Saturday. These are Harbaugh’s Giants now. The kid at quarterback is his quarterback going forward, for better or worse and as much as we’ve already anointed him — one of Parcells’ favorite expressions — because of how he threw some life into another lost Giants season as a rookie.
We still don’t know whether or not Dart will see action against the Vikings. It seems like he ought to, if only for a couple of series, just because he has had an inconsistent training camp at best. And if you’ve been following all of this on social media, you know that Giants fans — before a single preseason snap by any Giants quarterback — want that to be the fault of the new offensive coordinator, Matt Nagy. Facing tremendous pressure of his own.
Here is something Nagy has said about what he’s been seeing from Dart, who hasn’t been hitting what he’s aiming at nearly often enough:
“If there’s one or two plays where he might not be seeing it well, let’s figure out why you’re not. And if you’re not, let’s just get rid of the play. Let’s go to a different play. We’ve got enough plays. And so, we’re digging through that right now. We’re filtering through that to figure out, “What does he like? What’s he feel comfortable with?
“And so, now when we find those plays and we figure out what that is, now you’ve got to go execute and make them happen on the field, and I think that’s the biggest, probably, obstacle that we’re going through right now, which is fun as a coaching staff.”
We all know that Harbaugh isn’t here if Dart hadn’t beaten him here, then showed the promise he showed last season. If Harbaugh didn’t see a lot, just because none of us did when the kid wasn’t running himself into harm’s way, he saw enough. It is an established fact that this is a quarterback’s sport every big as much as it is a coach’s sport. Between now and the opener against the Cowboys, Sunday Night Football, Sept. 13, it all gets real for both of them.
So far, Harbaugh has been cagey about his quarterback. When asked the other day if Dart actually would see action on Saturday, he said, “That’s a good question I’m gonna have to dodge.”
Whether or not Dart is on the field Saturday, Giants fans will let Harbaugh know — long and loud — just how happy they are that he is on that field. They saw Ben McAdoo hired after Coughlin left, and Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge and then Daboll. And the Giants just kept getting smaller.
Then Harbaugh hit the open market. The Giants needed someone exactly like him so much they probably would have thrown in naming rights to the big, ugly gray bowl if he’d asked for that. And from the day he was hired, he really has been swept along by the sound of applause. Giants fans don’t just want Harbaugh on that wall. They need him on that wall. Sometimes even the first preseason game feels as if it matters. It’s because of how much Giants fans want their team to matter again.
