New York Giants: Tuna Headed To Canton

From the desk of:   DO IT FOR THE DUKE

NEW YORK GIANTS - The Big Tuna Gains Membership Into The Canton Club.

Member: Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2013

 

Bill Parcells

Head Coach - New York Giants

1983 - 1990

 

 

Why Bill Parcells needed to wait a second year for election into the Pro Football Hall of Fame is  beyond me.  However with this year's correction, he now takes his rightful place along side the other Giants greats and legends already enshrined in the Hall.
 

 

The Bill Parcells Giants will never have the word "Flashy" used to describe them.  They were grunts in their most basic form.  Parcells teams brought back and thrived playing a more primitive form of the game.  Bill reintroduced Smash Mouth Football into the National Football League.  In both defense and running the ball, Bill Parcells assembled perhaps one of the strongest teams in NFL history.  He didn't care if the other team knew what play the Giants were running.  Parcells merely dared you to stop them.

 

"Run with power men!  ..........that's why you lift all those weights." - Bill Parcells

 

It was actually coach Ray Perkins who began the slow process of re-establishing the New York Giants to their lost former prominence.  He brought the Giants back to the playoffs in 1981 after a long, dormant period in Big Blue history.  But when Coach Perkins left to coach Alabama, it was Bill Parcells who took over, and transformed Big Blue into a nightmare for the likes of the great Bill Walsh and the 49ers and Joe Gibbs and the Redskins.  Of course, his greatest achievement was turning the Giants into two time Super Bowl champions.

 

 

Bill Parcells was old school in every sense.  He was hard on his players.  If he didn't like you, or worse yet didn't respect you, then you had a real problem on your hands, not to mention potential unemployment issues.  Ask Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler about that.  But if you were one of "his guys", then you were mint.  He'd still be hard on his guys.  But there was an unconditional trust between them.  As tough as he was, and as mean as he could be with the media, even us fans knew that underneath his menacing exterior, was the cuddly heart of a fuzzy bear.  When he stepped down as head coach after winning Super Bowl XXV, not only was I devastated, I thought the Giants would never be good ever again.  I thought that as a grown twenty three year old adult, and life long football and Giants fan.  Coach Ray Handley only reinforced that notion.

 

 

Two Super Bowls are his Giants legacy.  Funny thing is, for much of his time here, it seemed as if the Giants struggled mightily to gain respect and success, because the style of football they played was laborious.  But if you understood it, the game plan was glorious.  Bill Parcells led a team that could play with anybody.  But the clashes against the 49ers are what I relish most from that era.  Bill Parcells guided his teams beyond the best of the best.

 

 

 

 

Mike.BTB