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 Jim Fassel says his team will be in the playoffs this season.
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Friday, January 19
Giant turnaround came after losing streak
By Tom Oates
Special to ESPN.com
Under Jim Fassel, the Giants have been the NFL's most fractious team, proof
positive that in football two halves don't necessarily add up to a whole.
Throughout 1998 and 1999, as the Giants consistently failed to match the
promise they showed during their 1997 playoff season under Fassel, tensions
mounted. Seldom did anyone venture across the demilitarized zone that ran
through the heart of the team's locker room.
|  | | Back-to-back losses to the Rams and Lions forced Jim Fassel to make the "guarantee." |
Offense on one side, defense on the other, both frustrated by the same
thing: the offense's inability to score.
Hostilities in this intramural border war escalated whenever locker room
power brokers such as linebacker Jessie Armstead and defensive end Michael
Strahan went public with criticism of their offensive teammates, which they
did frequently.
Clearly, that was not a stable environment for a team that some thought had
Super Bowl talent. But now, as the Giants prepare to play the Ravens in Super
Bowl XXXV at Tampa, the frustration of the past has been replaced by the
exhiliration of seven straight victories, the franchise's first NFC
championship in 10 years and even some national respect after a 41-0
dismantling of the favored Vikings in the conference title game.
In a locker room once hopelessly divided by self-interests and notable
mainly for finger-pointing, there is now more hand-holding than a revival
meeting. Rumor is, the Giants have actually been heard whistling while they
work this week. Right now, they are more harmonious than the Cleavers.
But while everyone knows the Giants' Berlin Wall has come down, they just
can't agree on when the darn thing actually crumbled.
The popular theory is that it fell on Nov. 22, when Fassel made a guarantee
that in time might take its place alongside another famous guarantee by
another famous New Yorker (Joe Namath) just before Super Bowl III.
Fassel's Giants had lost back-to-back home games to the Rams and Lions, the
latter a 31-21 debacle that ended with the team being booed off the field and
trashed in the media. After a 7-2 start, they appeared once again to be the
same old Giants.
But, Fassel, dubbed Mr. Rogers by the New York media, made a stunning
decision at that point. He shed his mild-mannered demeanor and transformed
himself into a ramblin', gamblin' man overnight. The Giants haven't lost
since.
"This team is going to the playoffs, OK?" Fassel said. "This team is going
to the playoffs. I'm raising the expectations. I'm raising the stakes. I'm
upping the ante. This is a poker game and I'm shoving the chips to the center
of the table."
To make his point, Fassel cut Bashir Livingston, a special-teams standout
who made three costly mistakes against the Lions. That got the players'
attention.
But Fassel didn't stop there. Since the guarantee, he has been more
aggressive and vocal than ever before. He's become more open with the media
and ordered his players to be less open. He's been quicker to get in players'
faces.
At first, it looked like Fassel's guarantee was the last act of a desperate
coach. After all, if the Giants didn't make the playoffs it was widely
anticipated that he would be fired. So there really wasn't much risk for
Fassel in guaranteeing a playoff berth.
"Everyone looked at him like he was a madman who was about to lose his
job," linebacker Micheal Barrow said. "But we took a bite into what he was saying."
That has been evident, especially as the Giants kept winning. The players have appeared both relaxed and energized since that day.
"I didn't make the guarantee for any specific reason," Fassel said. "It was
just in my gut. I was angry about some things. I wasn't going to let anybody
tell me what we were going to do or how we were going to do it. I didn't want
my team walking about like they were second-class citizens. My attitude was,
take a tough stance and don't be afraid to let the world know what you're
thinking. I was proud of my guys and felt we were going to (make the
playoffs) and said so. It lit a match and that fire has been burning ever
since. I haven't had to light another one."
However, some think the Giants' moment of truth might have come three days
before the guarantee, when they hit rock bottom in that home loss to a
mediocre Lions team that was in the process of falling out of playoff
contention.
The Giants had plowed through a ridiculously easy schedule to reach 7-2
even though their offense was still sputtering. When the defense collapsed --
giving up 38 points to the Rams and 31 to the Lions, the two highest point
totals all season -- the Giants hit rock bottom.
The fan and media criticism was expanded to include the defense in general
and the secondary in particular. With that, the entire team was under siege.
No one could point fingers at anyone but himself.
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Coach showed how much faith he had in us when he made the guarantee following that game. Sometimes you've got to drop to the bottom before you can work your way back to the top. That game was the low point. ” |
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— Kerry Collins, Giants quarterback |
"Coach showed how much faith he had in us when he made the guarantee
following that game," quarterback Kerry Collins said. "Sometimes you've got to drop to the bottom before you can work your way back to the top. That game
was the low point."
But there are those on the Giants who think it wasn't the turning point,
either. Some think it came two weeks later, in a 9-7 victory over the
arch-rival Redskins.
The Giants had rebounded from the Lions loss by hammering the hapless
Cardinals, but then they had to go to Washington on Dec. 3. They didn't
secure the victory until the end, when a 49-yard field-goal attempt by the
Redskins' 44-year-old Eddie Murray fell just short.
"Had we lost that game, especially on that last-second field goal, it may
have set us back a couple of years," Strahan said. "It would have been
devastating for us.
"When we won that game, and the way we won it, the team said, "Hey, if we
play together, if we stay together, we have a chance to win.' From then on,
guys have done that and we've been successful all the way through. It seems
like the bigger the game, the more everybody comes together, the more
everyone leans on each other and the more we play for each other."
If togetherness is indeed the reason for the Giants' sudden success, it
might have had its genesis not in the last seven weeks but in the last
offseason.
The Giants lost six of their last eight games in the turbulent 1999 season
to finish 7-9. By the end of the season, the offensive and defensive players
were barely on speaking terms.
That's when Fassel began a campaign to take back a locker room controlled
by loose cannons. He made locker-room unity his No. 1 offseason priority.
Fassel made the decision to let offensive coordinator Sean Payton call the
plays, so he could concentrate on the big picture and become more of a
team-wide leader. He improved his relationship with the defensive players,
especially Strahan and Armstead, the loosest of the cannons.
But that wasn't all Fassel did. He took the players on a boat trip around
Manhattan in the spring. He took them on a wild and crazy golf outing in May.
During training camp, he took them to see the movie "Gladiator." During the
season, there was a day of bowling. Camaraderie became the order of the day.
Even the Giants' personnel moves had the effect of breaking down barriers.
Free-agent offensive linemen Lomas Brown, Glenn Parker and Dusty Zeigler were
veterans who had won awards and played in championship games. Thus, they
commanded instant respect from the defensive players. Plus, they were locker
room leaders who weren't about to take any grief from the defense.
"I don't know if it's maturity or what you would call it," guard Ron Stone
said. "Everybody came to understand that things work more when there is no
animosity. We've been working hard and caring about each other instead of
fighting each other. There's been no problems."
The rift between the offense and defense disappeared during training camp,
then reappeared early in the season when Strahan went off on the offense
while Fassel was out of town. When Fassel returned, Strahan visited the boss'
office and emerged properly chastened. Nary a discouraging word has been
heard from the locker room since, not even after the loss to the Lions.
Now, the Giants are picking up steam. Collins is giving Fassel the quality
quarterback play he never had, not even in 1997, and the defense is playing
better than ever, with a revived secondary, led by Jason Sehorn, playing behind an increasingly ferocious front seven.
"You've got to have a belief in yourself, you've got to have a belief in
your team, you've got to have a determination, you've got to work at it and
you've got to push through the tough times," Fassel said. "All our guys are
on the same page."
Even if they're not exactly sure how they got there.
Green under fire in Minnesota ... again
At midseason, Vikings coach Dennis Green was riding a wave of popularity.
His gutsy gambit with second-year quarterback Daunte Culpepper had thrust him into contention for both coach of the year and executive of the year.
|  | | Dennis Green's playoff record is 4-8. |
After the Vikings' 41-0 trouncing Sunday in New York, however, Green is
once again under heavy fire in the Twin Cities. That's because the blame for
the massive failure can be evenly divided between Green's coaching decisions
and his personnel decisions.
Coaching?
Although Green has led the Vikings to the playoffs eight times in nine
years, he has a 4-8 playoff record. If there's a pattern to those failures
it's that the Vikings lose games they shouldn't lose.
Sunday, Green's Vikings simply weren't ready to play. Wide receiver Randy Moss noticed it before the kickoff. The rest of the football world figured it
out less than three minutes into the game, at which time the Vikings trailed, 14-0.
Personnel?
Since he wrested control of the Vikings away from the departed Jeff
Diamond, Green's predilection has been to spend his salary-cap dollars on
offense. Along the way, he retained his offensive stars and drafted
megatalents such as Culpepper and Moss when others wouldn't touch them.
That preference cost Green dearly this season, however. The Vikings lost their last three regular season games -- to the Rams, Packers and Colts -- which cost them the home-field advantage. It also gave the Giants a blueprint on how to beat them, which was to come out throwing against a secondary so bereft of talent that the Giants, a running team at heart, were able to pass the football at will.
Tom Oates of the Wisconsin State Journal writes his weekly NFC column every Thursday for ESPN.com.
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