The New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins have a scant history, but the Giants have always admired the Dolphins’ model for success. In 1979, they hired George Young, Miami’s director of player personnel, as their general manager.
We all know how that worked out, but it wasn’t the first time the Giants had poached from Don Shula’s team.
In 1974, the Giants hired Bill Arnsparger, the mastermind behind the Dolphins’ “No-Name Defense” that was the key consecutive Super Bowl titles the previous two seasons.
Arnsparger knew defense better than just about anyone in the game at the time, but offense was not his thing, and the Giants knew that. General manager Andy Robustelli told reporters at a press conference at the iconic 21 Club restaurant that Arnsparger would have control of team and a large role in the draft process.
They were overpaying Arnsparger to leave Miami and take on the unenviable task of turning the Giants, who had won just two games in 1973, into winners again.
“We felt to ask a man to leave the Super Bowl champions he needed some kind of security, so that’s what we offered him,” Wellington Mara, the team’s president, said of the three-year contract, which would pay Arnsparger an estimated $70,000 per year. “It’s not something he demanded.”
It didn’t matter. The Giants’ next three drafts, whoever ran them, produced no impact offensive players. If they did anything, they strengthened the defense with players such as Harry Carson, George Martin, Dan Lloyd, Ray Rhodes and Troy Archer.
The Giants signed an aging Larry Csonka and traded their 1975 first-round pick to Dallas in exchange for quarterback Craig Morton, a move that will go down as one of the franchise’s worst of all time.
Morton got rocked on a weekly basis as the punchless Giants played home games in three different states. Dallas used that pick, which was second overall in 1975, to select future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Randy White.
The Giants pulled the plug on the Arnsparger era seven games into his third season after the team was whacked, 27-0, by the Pittsburgh Steelers at the new Giants Stadium.
Even against the struggling Super Bowl champions, the Giants offense was not “competitive.” When most of the 69,783 spectators began leaving the new Giants Stadium the drizzle of the third quarter, Bill Arnsparger might well have left, too. The shame is that he remains an excellent coach of defensive football. He organized the defensive unit that helped the Miami Dolphins win two consecutive Super Bowls, once with a perfect 17‐0 record. And he was reorganizing the Giants’ defensive unit. He’ll probably return to the Dolphins as Don Shula’s defensive coach again. But he betrayed the Giants offense by not hiring dominant offensive coordinator.
Bill Arnsparger knows offense, but apparently from the viewpoint of a defensive coach, not from the attack viewpoint that offense demands. With the Giants’ difficult schedule, points were a necessity.
The Giants scored 20 points or fewer in 28 of Arnsparger’s 35 games as head coach, which amounted to just seven victories. Arnsparger went back to Miami to caddie for Shula and enjoyed more success, helping the Dolphins get back to the Super Bowl in the 1982 season.
Arnsparger went on to be the head coach at LSU from 1984-86 and from there became the athletic director at the University of Florida.
In 1992, he took the defensive coordinator job under Bobby Ross’ staff with the San Diego Chargers. Two years later, the Chargers made their first Super Bowl appearance.
Arnsparger had a great career in football. The only blemish was that 35-game hiccup with the snakebit, dysfunctional Giants of the mid-1970s.
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