East Rutherford, n.j.
Yet as players and coaches paced through their work, they did so with four Super Bowl championship banners hanging overhead — two at each end of the building — serving as oh-so-visible reminders that this remains the tradition-laden franchise of the Mara and Tisch families, of Bill Parcells and, yes, of Tom Coughlin, who coached the team to two of those glorious victories.
That is the line that Coughlin’s 38-year-old successor, Ben McAdoo, must walk as he tries to restore the Giants to contender status. It is the line between old and new.
The Giants maintained organizational continuity by promoting McAdoo from offensive coordinator to head coach, so clearly the desire was to avoid a radical change of direction. But not everything can be kept as it was, not with the proud franchise coming off three straight losing seasons and four consecutive non-playoff years; if all was well, Coughlin still would be in charge.
So it has been up to McAdoo to figure out what needed to stay the same and what needed to be changed. He is five months into that task, and he likes to say that what he is doing is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
“My goal was to keep my head down and keep on working like I always have, not change the way I work, put the program in place — the evolution, not revolution philosophy — not rush to any conclusions and take our time with our decisions,” he said as he sat in his office after Thursday’s practice. “Expectations — we laid out the goal right away. And everybody in the building knows what the goal is. The locker room is on board with what the goal is. And that’s to put the fifth trophy in the case.”
McAdoo will attempt to take the lessons he learned working for two Super Bowl-winning coaches, the Green Bay Packers’ Mike McCarthy and Coughlin, and come up with an approach that works in his first NFL head coaching job.
“I’m trying to blend the two experiences that really have shaped my professional career,” he said. “I’m trying to blend those two together and come up with the best mix for this organization.”
Players say they like what they have observed so far.
“Obviously (with) different leadership, you’re gonna have a different energy,” running back Rashad Jennings said last week. “It’s just exciting.”
McAdoo, like McCarthy, grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania. McAdoo is from Homer City, Pa., about 50 miles from Pittsburgh, his father and grandfather were coal miners and there was a time in his life, he says, when he thought he might follow the same path. But his mother wanted him to go to college, so he ended up at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
McAdoo had been a 185-pound offensive tackle in high school; there wasn’t much of a college football-playing future in that. But McAdoo got into coaching while in college, going back to his old high school to do it. He coached kids not much younger than him, something that would prove instructive as he later moved up the coaching ranks.
“There were times I coached players who were older than I was in this league,” he said. “It helped me as I was somewhat of a hot head early on as a coach. I think it helped me take a step back and realize that probably wasn’t the best way to go about your business, and to take a bigger-picture look at things.”
He moved on to Michigan State and got his master’s degree in kinesiology, with plans to go to law school and perhaps end up as an administrator in a college athletic department. But he’d been forced to give up coaching while in Michigan because the high schools there didn’t accept his Pennsylvania certification.
That’s when he realized, he said, that he missed coaching and coaching was what he wanted to do. The next step was to break that news to his girlfriend, Toni, who is now his wife, and who’d accompanied him to Michigan.
“I came home one day and told her I was gonna coach football,” McAdoo said. “I thought she was gonna look at me like I was crazy and tell me I was nuts. But she kind of saw it coming.”
McAdoo’s NFL coaching break came after he essentially stalked McCarthy, he acknowledges, one year at the scouting combine in Indianapolis. McAdoo didn’t know McCarthy. But McCarthy, a Pittsburgh native, was the offensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints and the team had an opening on its offensive coaching staff. So McAdoo, after a brief phone conversation with McCarthy about the job, drove through a snowstorm to try to get some face-to-face time with McCarthy.
“It was at the Canterbury Hotel, from the mall right inside the back door to the Canterbury,” McAdoo said. “I had a big duffel bag full of books and a suit on, and I was waiting for him to come back to the hotel. That was interesting. He had an interesting look on his face when he saw me.”
The tactic didn’t work immediately. But McCarthy did bring McAdoo to the NFL a year later as an entry-level quality control coach for the Saints in 2004. When McCarthy moved to San Francisco as offensive coordinator of the 49ers in 2005 and to Green Bay as the Packers’ head coach in 2006, McAdoo went with him. McAdoo taught McCarthy’s offense to other assistant coaches and gained responsibilities, becoming the tight ends coach and then the quarterbacks coach in Green Bay, which meant working with Aaron Rodgers. Coughlin brought him to New York in 2014 as the Giants’ offensive coordinator.
McAdoo brought with him a West Coast offensive system to the Giants, something that was completely new to the team’s two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Eli Manning.
“It just wasn’t a different system,” McAdoo said. “It was a 180(-degree change) in a lot of ways philosophically. The verbiage — nothing was the same. So he really had to buy in. And I was the only one in the building who had a background in the system. … I had to coach coaches first, make sure everybody was on the same page that way. And hats off to those guys, to the coaches that year in 2014, because without them, there was no chance. It wasn’t pretty early. We made some progress late and were a top-10 offense. It wasn’t pretty early, but they bought in. The players bought in, eventually bought in. And we got things going in the right direction.”
It wasn’t only a matter of teaching a new system to Manning and other players. It was a matter of selling it to them as well.
“That’s a huge part of this job, is salesmanship,” McAdoo said. “A huge part of it. You have to be yourself. You have to be honest. But you have to be able to sell the vision and sell the plan. And players have to buy into what you’re selling. Once they believe, you can do anything. But they have to believe. And you have to be consistent with the way you carry yourself and that you’re always pointing back to the vision, to the identity.”
Last season, the Giants ranked eighth in the NFL in total offense. But their last-ranked defense surrendered a series of fourth-quarter leads, and a 6-10 record led to Coughlin’s exit. The Giants spent heavily in free agency this offseason to attempt to repair their defense.
“We have a chip on our shoulder about how we played last year,” third-year linebacker Devon Kennard said. “I think we have more understanding of the defense and what Coach Spags (defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo) is asking of us. And we want to go out and produce every day.”
Said Jennings: “We’ve got a really good team. We know that. When you look at last year again, we did some really good things. . . . We didn’t finish in the fourth quarter like we should have. But we’ve got a good team. We didn’t have somebody come in at the head coaching position to blow up the team. We have somebody in house who knows how to control a room, who knows how to pull the best out of everybody, who’s meticulous about how they go about their business. And for that, we get to build on the successes that we already had.
“So we have a lot of accountability and a lot of guys just want to pick up where we left off. We addressed some issues and concerns that we felt we needed to in the offseason with free agency and the draft. So this is gonna be a better team this year.”
McAdoo vows to work tirelessly to bring that about. He said when players left last week for their offseason break, he would take a little bit of time off himself. But he added that he’ll never be far from football.
“When you get this job, I don’t think you go in and put your feet up,” McAdoo said. “I think you have to work early. You have to work late. And during business hours, when the building’s full of people, you need to be able to have a revolving door and put out fires. There are three dumpster fires a day in this job. You have to be willing to put them out and you have to be where your feet are. You have to be able to handle them, and stick and move, and not worry about all the things that you have to do, and be able to sacrifice time when the building’s empty or when you’re at home.
“That’s the beautiful thing about today’s world. If I want to work looking at a body of water, if I want to work with my son on my lap at home, I can pipe in from anywhere and get some things done that way and stay ahead of the game.”
McAdoo already has experienced the intensified scrutiny that comes with his new job. The ill-fitting suit that he wore to his introductory news conference was widely ridiculed. Everyone knows, after all, how fashion-conscious sportswriters are.
That will be nothing, of course, compared to what will accompany McAdoo’s first two-game losing streak as a head coach. He says, however, he will be the same person Manning and his other players knew as their offensive coordinator.
“I’m not changing who I am,” McAdoo said. “I’m gonna be the same guy I’ve always been. I just moved over an office. … When I coached tight ends, I was the head coach of the tight end room. When I was the quarterbacks coach, I was the head coach of the quarterback room. When I was the offensive coordinator, I was the head coach of the offense. Now I’m just the head coach of the team. So now I have an opportunity to address more people, a larger scale of leadership. I don’t think you can change who you are. I think that’s a mistake.”