Blame Giants owners, not Tiki
Posted: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 11:24 AM
Tiki Barber has taken a lot of criticism for the way he went about his retirement last year and for his criticism of his head coach, Tom Coughlin. He’s going to take some more when his book “Tiki: My Life in the Game and Beyond” hits the shelves.
He doesn’t deserve it. The fault for all the disappointing years the Giants have had since Bill Parcells left 15 years ago isn’t Tiki’s fault; it’s ownership’s.
According to excerpts published by The New York Daily News, Barber says he’d still be playing for the Giants if Coughlin had been replaced after the season. It’s news that’s going to be a major disruption in the Giants’ locker room as reporters ask his former teammates about their coach.
It’s going to be an awful position in which to be because a lot of the players agree with Tiki; they have as much affection for Coughlin as they do for jock itch. Maybe less – at least you can get rid of jock itch with a topical ointment, but Coughlin isn’t going away.
But they can’t say that because they’re football players and as such they’re expected to circle the wagons and say Coughlin’s their coach and they’ll follow him anywhere, even to a losing season.
Coughlin is a martinet who is trying to run a 2K7 team under 1950 rules. During the games, he skitters up and down the sidelines like a slimmed-down Mrs. Doubtfire, red-faced and expending his energies on berating the officials instead of running his team.
The Giants pretty much quit on him last season. And yet he kept his job because Tiki gained more than 200 yards in a season-ending win over the Redskins that allowed Big Blue to squeeze into the playoffs, where they lost in the first round.
This is mentioned in Tiki’s book. Prominently.
In a way, it’s Barber’s fault. He’s a smart man, a former high-school valedictorian who had the personality, presence and intelligence to get a job with NBC News and Sunday Night Football after he retired. But he wasn’t smart enough as a kid to become a great basketball player instead of a football player.
If he’d become as good in the NBA as he was in the NFL, he could have gotten his coach fired in no time at all, the same way Magic Johnson once did and Kobe Bryant did. In basketball, if the players hate the coach, the coach is gone. In football, it’s the other way around.
It shouldn’t be. It’s fruitless to argue about the obligation of professionals to follow the coach’s orders. If they don’t play for the guy, the only way to change things is to get a new coach. You can’t give 53 guys attitude transplants.
But the Giants have been exceptionally inept in hiring coaches. They tabbed Ray Handley to replace Parcells despite warnings that Handley, a good X’s and O’s guy with the personality of a rice cake, would be a disaster, which is what he was. Then they stuck with Handley far beyond when it was obvious he had to go, which was after two or three games.
Jim Fassel was a popular guy with the players and the media, a truly nice guy who worked his butt off and got the team to a Super Bowl. He stayed until it became obvious he lacked whatever it is that separates good coaches from great coaches.
After the 2003 season, the Giants fired Fassel. The team had a golden opportunity to hire a young coach with new ideas and the ability to relate to today’s players, the kind of coach Parcells had been when the team plucked him out of obscurity in 1983.
Instead, they hired Coughlin, who had already failed in one job and has done nothing notable in this one. The Giants could have dumped him after last year, when he started 6-2 and finished 2-6, but management stood by his man, even if he’s hated by his players.
That’s when Tiki left, and who can blame him? He’d made his money, gone as far as he could in his profession, and was working for a guy who sucked all the joy out of the game Barber had loved. When you hate going to work every day and you have enough in the bank to tide you over, it’s time to find a new line of work.
He’s right. The Giants blew it with Coughlin just as they did with Handley. If Tiki’s a distraction, it’s not his fault, it’s theirs.
