With the lack of any hard news in sports these days there’s a lot of “what-if” articles going around. Paul Schwartz, who has covered the New York Giants for the New York Post since 1994, has been publishing quite a few of these pieces and one in particular gets me every time.
Why didn’t the Giants hire Bill Belichick in 1991 when Bill Parcells left?
“Parcells left in May following the Super Bowl-winning 1990 season,” writes Schwartz. “But before that, GM George Young had shown favoritism for Ray Handley, the running backs coach and clock-management guy, over Belichick, the defensive coordinator who Young thought cursed too much and was a bit of an oddball. Belichick left in February, leaving Handley to be named head coach, and the rest is very sad Giants history. Belichick went on to have some success, it seems.”
George Young made a lot of winning decisions in his long tenure as the general manager of the Giants. He also made a bunch of poor ones. None was as poor as the decision to hire Ray Handley, who was as ill-quipped off the field as he was on it to handle the position. He was fired after two seasons and replaced by Dan Reeves.
To be fair, Bill Belichick was not the Bill Belichick we know today. He was younger, brasher and perhaps not ready for a head coaching gig. Hence his hiring and firing as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in the mid-1990s.
But Belichick would learn from that, and quickly. In his next — and current head coaching job — with the New England Patriots, Belichick has won nine AFC Championships and six Super Bowls. And he’s not done.
Handley never coached or worked in football again. The Giants eventually recovered, but it took nine years to get back to the Super Bowl and the hiring of another figure off the Parcells coaching tree, Tom Coughlin, to guide them to their next world championship.
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