George Young didn’t build the Giants into a powerhouse overnight

Let’s go back to 1983 and judge Young the same way we are now judging Joe Schoen

At Joe Schoen’s bye week presser he answered affirmatively when asked if he expected to be brought back next season. He also claimed “We’re not far off”.

Giants’ Twitter and several of the Giants’ beat writers have been, shall we say, skeptical of these answers. Ed Valentine polled the Big Blue View community on the first of these questions and got a solid if not landslide endorsement of Schoen from you:

As bad as some of you think you have it being Giants fans right now, I and those of you similar to my age know that the current dry spell is nothing compared to the wilderness years of 1964-1980, when the Giants had zero playoff appearances and only two seasons with a winning record. If you’re old enough to remember that era, you’ll remember something else: The Giants hired a new general manager in 1979, George Young, and Young got the Giants to the playoffs in his third season as GM…only to have the team collapse the two seasons after that when Bill Parcells took over for Ray Perkins as head coach.

Young’s scorecard after 5 seasons as GM: 1 playoff appearance (and 1 playoff win), and records of 6-10, 4-12, 9-7, 4-5 (a strike-shortened season), and 3-12-1. Young almost fired Parcells after one season (1982) and replaced him with Howard Schnellenberger but in the end decided not to. I don’t remember if Young himself was in danger of being shown the door, but if these questions are being asked of Schoen, surely it would have been fair to ask them of Young.

We all know how the story ends: Playoffs in 1984 and 1985, and a Super Bowl ring in 1986. Did George Young think the Giants were not far off in 1983? How far off were they, actually, and how did they get from there to a title?

Here’s a table showing the Giants’ starters (data courtesy of Pro Football Reference) for 1978, their last season under GM (actually “Director of Operations”) Andy Robustelli and head coach John McVay (grandfather of Sean), and for every subsequent season up to 1986:

Data courtesy of Pro Football Reference

Unless you want to take a stroll down memory lane, most of the names in the table are irrelevant to the discussion. The purpose is to identify how the 1986 Super Bowl champion Giants were built, and how long it took. Toward that end, the starters on that team (far right column) are color-coded in red in the year in which they first became starters for the Giants. Some of the salient points are:

• Young inherited a team with no offensive stars but with two defensive players who would be key starters for the 1986 Super Bowl Champions, including Hall of Famer Harry Carson (both Carson and George Martin had been starters for several years before 1978).
• It took Young three seasons to get the Giants to the playoffs for the first time in 18 years, but by that time he had only added three players who would eventually start for the 1986 team (Phil Simms, Brad Benson, and Lawrence Taylor). Simms of course was chosen over Joe Montana.
• The Giants went right back into the wilderness for two years after that first playoff appearance, just as Schoen’s Giants teams have done (barring them running the table and making the playoffs at 9-8 this season).
• By 1983, Young’s sixth year at the helm and his worst season as GM (3-12-1), only five of the players who would start for the 1986 champs were already starters: Simms, Benson, Taylor, plus Billy Ard and Terry Kinard. (There were a couple more who were on the team by then but were not starters, e.g., Jim Burt and Leonard Marshall)
• Young could easily have been fired by Wellington Mara at that point – there were some good players in addition to those mentioned above on the 1983 team, but not enough, and the product on the field was a dismal failure, finishing 1-10-1 after a 2-2 start.
• Finally, in 1984, the team jelled and became a perennial playoff contender, eventually winning it all in 1986. Fifteen of the 22 starters on the Super Bowl team weren’t on the team or weren’t yet starting until 1984 or later.

Here’s the early career of one of those key starters, Carl Banks. Banks is again this year a Pro Football Hall of Fame semifinalist. You wouldn’t have guessed that outcome from his first two seasons, when he didn’t start most of the Giants’ games:

Courtesy of Pro Football Reference

Banks was the No. 3 pick in the draft in 1984. He was OK his first two seasons, but he certainly didn’t look special…until 1986, when he replaced Byron Hunt, an OK but not special player himself, and really broke out. How would today’s Giants fan feel if the No. 3 pick in the draft was not starting regularly by his second season?

A side note to the Banks story: The Giants already had a great third linebacker (besides Carson and Taylor) in veteran Brad Van Pelt. After the terrible 1983 season, Van Pelt wanted a big raise. Reportedly Young told him that he could lose without him as well as he could lose with him and traded him, replacing him with Banks. Some thinking along these lines may have gone into Schoen’s decision to let Saquon Barkley finally leave last off-season. What he needs is for Barkley’s replacement, Tyrone Tracy, to work out anywhere near as well as Banks did for Young.

We don’t know what the future holds for Joe Schoen, for Brian Daboll, or for the players currently on the Giants’ roster. We do know that, like George Young, Schoen inherited a couple of players who are worthy of starting for a Super Bowl team (Dexter Lawrence, Andrew Thomas). We also know that with the exception of (fingers crossed) Malik Nabers, his first round picks haven’t yet shown they are worthy of having been taken that high (in fact one of them is named Banks too).

If George Young’s Giants tenure teaches us anything, it is that rising from the ashes doesn’t necessarily come quickly, nor uniformly. Unlike Joe Schoen, Young got to pick his quarterback in his first draft, and for most of five years, it looked like he’d made the wrong choice. Schoen inherited a QB not of his choosing, in a year where there were none to be had in the draft in any case. Giving him that chance is almost surely on John Mara’s mind as he thinks back to the George Young era.

Schoen and Daboll could turn out to be complete busts. Young and Parcells sure looked like that after 1983. Credit Wellington Mara for not jumping the gun. We’ll see if his son is as patient, and if so, whether his patience pays off.