Category Archives: jets-giants

Rhymes with sad

The familiar smiting of foreheads continues with New York football fans. Ahead by 11 points with fewer than seven minutes to play last week, the Giants managed to lose to Philadelphia, 22-21.

Cue Mark Twain—“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”—and I’ll tell you about covering a striking preview to current gridiron developments in 1976 as Newsday’s Giants beat writer.

In ’76, the Giants had at last won a game—in their 10th try—at home against Washington, whereupon they immediately lost the next week. By one point. This year, their first victory—much earlier; sixth game—also came in the Jersey Meadowlands, also against Washington, also followed by this latest failure, also by a single point.

Furthermore, in each of the long overdue, skin-of-the-teeth first-of-the-season successes—in 1976 and 2020—the Giants barely had escaped yet another defeat in the final minute vs. Washington.

In ’76, with the Giants ahead by 3, Washington set up for a final offensive play at the Giants’ seven-yard line with 41 seconds remaining. An option pass, the potential winning score, was tipped by a rookie Giants linebacker named Harry Carson (who went on to a 13-year NFL career and a place in the Hall of Fame) and was intercepted in the end zone.

In 2020, ahead by 1 with 36 seconds left, the Giants were faced with a Washington two-point conversion attempt after the apparent tying touchdown. That went awry under defensive pressure from Giants defenders and, combined with Washington coach Ron Rivera’s risky decision not to play for the PAT and overtime, saved the Giants’ bacon.

Followed by the next week’s close-but-no-cigar let-down. Now as then. An echo from 44 years earlier.

The famous George Santayana quote—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—may not apply so much as novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s rejoinder: “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana. We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

Not that re-runs are exact. In ’76, there was no sports talk radio for anguished boosters to let off steam. No social media, either. Of course, here in 2020, with fans homebound by the coronavirus, there isn’t instant in-stadium Monday-morning quarterbacking via the old raspberry. And one other minor, extraneous difference: The Washington Football Team no longer has an offensive nickname, as in 1976.

So the Giants are 1-6, a smidge ahead of their ’76 record of 0-7, then on their way to 3-11. Another non-playoff season apparently is assured, which would make four in a row and eight in the last nine years. While, by the way, their co-tenants at MetLife Stadium, the New York Jets, who were 1-6 at this point in ’76, also headed for a 3-11 record, now are 0-7. Sort of neighboring mirror images.

“History is a poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water,” Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michaels wrote. “It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, or precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history; an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.”

Whoa. In 1976, after a seventh consecutive loss, the Giants fired head coach Bill Arnsparger, a brick of potential that appears about to hit winless Jets coach Adam Gase in the back of the head. And in ’76, the Jets had a first-year head coach, Lou Holtz, who resigned in hopelessness after the team’s next-to-last game. That idea wouldn’t be resurrected by this year’s first-year Giants coach, Joe Judge, would it? More rhyming history?

Jets-Giants: Nobody wins (until OT). So familiar.

Did this happen Sunday? Or in 1974?

IMG_0822………..

The Jets were playing the Giants in a rare regular-season NFL clash between New York teams, though the game wasn’t in New York. The Giants led, 20-13, early in the fourth period. The date was Dec. 6, 2015. Also, Nov. 10, 1974.

IMG_0822

The Jets, their bacon saved on an implausible keeper by their quarterback, summoned the tying touchdown in the dying moments and sent the game into overtime at 20-20. Whereupon their sudden-death victory was finalized when the Giants’ placekicker missed a field goal. Wide left.

Same plot. Same details. Same ending.

In ’74, 31-year-old Joe Namath, whose multiple knee surgeries rendered him the least likely person in the entire stadium—spectators included—to run with the ball, shocked the outfoxed Giants by literally limping in real-time slow motion on three-yard bootleg for the tying score. (Namath completed the hobble with a lame straight-arm more evocative of a “please don’t hit me now that I’m across the goal-line” appeal.)

joe

In ’15, an even older—but far healthier, at 33—Ryan Fitzpatrick, scrambled 15 yards on a desperation fourth-and-six to keep the Jets moving toward their late equalizer. Echoes that seem to qualify under the definition of déjà vu, the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.

ryan

There’s more. In ’74, when NFL sudden-death rules were new to the regular season and allowed a team to win on any first-possession score, the Giants needed only seven plays in the extra period to move to the Jets’ 25-yard line. There, on fourth-and-one, they opted for a decisive field goal try, but Pete Gogolak knocked the 42-yard attempt just left of the upright. (And the Jets soon answered with a Namath touchdown pass to Emerson Boozer.)

In ’15, it was Giants’ kicker Josh Brown who missed a 48-yarder that could have kept the overtime going and avoided defeat. He, too, missed to the left. A not-so-instant replay of Giants doom.

New York, New York? By 1974, the Giants had become Big Town ex-pats, leaving Yankee Stadium to play most of the ’73 season and all of ’74 in New Haven, Conn., at the Yale Bowl, their temporary home field while a new Giants Stadium was under construction in the New Jersey Meadowlands. So Connecticut was where they dueled the Jets that November.

In 2015, of course, the teams jousted in their five-year-old shared East Rutherford, N.J., home that replaced Giants Stadium. They’ve all been Jersey boys for a long time.

In ’74, Giants fans questioned why coach Bill Arnsparger hadn’t gone for a first down on that overtime fourth-and-one. In ’15, they are grumbling about coach Tom Coughlin’s choice to try converting a fourth-and-two on the Jets’ four yard-line, instead of taking an apparent clinching field goal when already leading by 10 points.

It could be argued that, 41 years later, there was a new back story to the Jets-Giants meeting, because in ’74, neither team was going anywhere, though the Jets—1-7 entering the Giants game—didn’t lose again in the old 14-game schedule and finished 7-7. The Giants, who had been 2-6, didn’t win again on their way to 2-12. In ’15, at least, both sides entered the local fray with some hope for the post-season, however frayed those hopes. Maybe the Jets can put the modest boost to a 7-5 record to good use. And even the 5-7 Giants, in dire straits, aren’t mathematically eliminated from the post-season.

But there is so much about this that hints at some cosmic burlesque. One beauty of sports is the unscripted drama, the surprise ending. And yet, as the Latin motto goes, nihil sub sole novum. Nothing new under the sun. Everything that is happening now has happened before.

I covered that 1974 game. I could have filled in the blanks.