The New York Giants face their long-time rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles, this Sunday. It’s a rivalry which stokes the memory of many long-time fans both good and bad.
The Giants have been on the wrong end of the rivalry recently, having won just once since 2013, but there was a time where the Eagles (and many other teams) feared the Giants, especially their defense.
In the 1980s, Lawrence Taylor and the Giants’ linebacking crew wreaked havoc on quarterbacks. One of their most frequent targets was Eagles’ quarterback Ron Jaworski, who once called a time out because he he couldn’t find Taylor. LT had left the field, apparently, to have his cleat adjusted.
Jaworski was sacked by Taylor a total of 12.5 times, so he knows the fury of the Giants’ rush. He always jokingly claimed he was the main reason LT was in the Hall of Fame. The reality is, Jaworski is just part of a long list of opponents that have the utmost respect for the Giants’ defense of the 80s.
In 1986, the Giants’ Super Bowl XXI championship season, they knocked out five starting quarterbacks and left many others in tatters. As they prepared for the NFC Championship Game against Washington, Chris Dufresne of the Los Angeles Times explained how the Giants were crushing opponents while staying within the rules.
“That’s the thing about the Giants: You can’t find a maimed quarterback who will say a bad word about them. The Giants wish no harm on anyone, it seems. They are merely a violent team in a violent game. They break quarterbacks, not rules.
“They’re clean,” said the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jaworski, who was given his season-ending Giant blow Nov. 9. “They’re very clean. That’s the question that always comes up when so many quarterbacks go down. But they play a clean game and I have respect for them. They’re not a bunch of loudmouth guys.”
In that game, the second meeting between the Giants and Eagles, Jaworski suffered a severed tendon in his hand as a result of a hit from linebacker Byron Hunt.
Before the game, Jaworski pleaded with coaches to assign an extra lineman to block Taylor, but first-year head coach Buddy Ryan insisted that rookie run-in back Keith Byars was up to the task.
He wasn’t. Jaworski was sacked four times and his replacement, Randall Cunningham, was sacked three times. The Giants won, 17-14.
You would have thought that Ryan would have learned from the first meeting, a 35-3 Giants whitewash, in which Jaworski and Cunningham were sacks three times apiece and were under constant pressure.
Jaworski joked later on in his media career about having nightmares about Taylor, who consumed him to the point where he was completely taken out of the game mentally, and eventually, physically.
“I looked at the film again and I took 13 clean hits,” Jaworski said of the No. 9 game. “I mean clean hits. I came home and asked if I really wanted to do this. They just kept coming. They just kept moving Taylor from side to side.”
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