Tom Rock: Ben McAdoo, former leading man with Giants, has found success with Patriots in smaller role
Former Giants head coach Ben McAdoo on the sidelines during a game at MetLife Stadium on Sep. 18, 2017. Credit: USA TODAY Sports/Brad Penner
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Ask any of the Patriots about a certain assistant coach with an unimpressive title and their eyes get wide and their lips start to smile.
“Honestly, it is one of the highlights of the week just to be able to spend time with him,” linebacker Christian Elliss said.
“He is brilliant,” said inside linebackers coach and defensive play-caller Zak Kuhr. “There’s also the energy he brings into the building every day. He is one of the funniest dudes I have ever been around. Just a great dude.”
Added head coach Mike Vrabel: “He met with me and he said, ‘Just tell me I am an assistant coach, I want to be here, and I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.’ I appreciated that. I think our players and coaches have really appreciated the perspective that he has brought.”
Gee, maybe the Giants should have thought about hiring this guy as their head coach.
Oh, wait. They already did.
The coach they are all raving about is Ben McAdoo. To Giants fans, he is the beginning of the long list of disappointing head coaches who followed Tom Coughlin and preceded John Harbaugh. He’s the guy who showed up in the oversized suit, oversaw the infamous boat trip to Miami before the playoff game in Green Bay, then was fired after benching Eli Manning.
To the Patriots? He is a silver mine of knowledge, an expert communicator and a cherished member of a family-style team that could very well win Super Bowl LX on Sunday.
When they call him by his nicknames — everyone seems to have their own for him, from “McAdocious” to “Big Mac” to “Slick Back Mac” — it’s hard to reconcile his popularity with the way the Giants’ locker room felt about him toward the end of his brief tenure.
Listening to these Patriots, though, and thinking about where the Giants went after his departure, one begins to think: Maybe that mix of apathy and venom said more about those Giants players than it did about McAdoo.
Or maybe McAdoo had to grow into this current place.
At one of the stops he made after the Giants, he was offensive coordinator with Carolina and helped get another New York outcast’s career back on track. It happens to be the same quarterback his team is facing in this Super Bowl, Sam Darnold.
McAdoo was asked what it is about the league that allows someone like Darnold to bounce around before emerging as a championship-level player.
“It’s easy to give up on them early,” McAdoo told Newsday, referring to quarterbacks. “They are all, when they get into the league, in different places, and the teams that they go to are in different places. Sometimes that can be challenging.
“And I also think sometimes you have to go through some tough times. I think when you go through tough times, you learn a lot about yourself, and if you can come through those tough times and look at them as learning experiences, then you have a chance to come out of it the right way.”
Does that go for coaches, too, Slick Back Mac?
“It goes for everybody,” he said of the parallel.
When the Giants hired McAdoo at age 37, first as their offensive coordinator for two seasons and then as Coughlin’s immediate successor as head coach, he was the hotshot fresh offensive mind in the league. Before there was Sean McVay, there was McAdoo, and the Giants thought they had the next great thing. It didn’t work out that way for a lot of the same reasons things didn’t work out with Darnold and the Jets.
These days McAdoo, 48, is content being in the literal shadows of the Patriots’ Super Bowl run. During the Opening Night festivities on Monday, when the spotlights were on all the other players and coaches, he was lurking in a dark corner of the convention center floor, far away from the cameras and reporters.
His underwhelming title — senior defensive assistant — does little to describe his role on this team. But every Wednesday, he gets his star turn.
McAdocious takes the stage, and having spent the previous week breaking down the opposing offense (his specialty was always offense), he lays it all out for the New England defense. He gives them the perspective of the other team’s coaches and players, what they want to accomplish with their plays, where they feel their strengths lie, and he translates that into the Patriots’ defensive language. He also handles the scout team that the starting defense goes against all week.
“He’s kind of filled the role that I did last year in Cleveland,” Vrabel said of his between-head-coaching stint.
For first-time defensive play-caller Kuhr, that’s been invaluable.
“It’s the most coveted position in this profession,” he said of NFL head coaches past and present. “For him to be that humble that he doesn’t care what role he is in, he is just going to commit to it and help us in any way possible, just speaks volumes about him as a person. There is a lot I couldn’t have done without him this season. B-Mac is the best.”
McAdoo still has aspirations of being more than just a role player on a staff.
“There is nothing like being in the fire and nothing like being out front,” he said. “I still like being in front of the players, that’s never going to go away. We all have an ego in this thing, right? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. But you have to manage that and do your role and do it at a high level and help that way.”
So he has spent the past two weeks breaking down film on a quarterback he once helped build up. He’s been telling Kuhr and the players what the Seahawks and Klint Kubiak — their young hotshot play-caller ready for his head-coaching stint — likely are thinking. He’s hoping that on Sunday he can win a second Super Bowl ring to go with the one he earned as a tight ends coach with the Packers in 2010.
And he hasn’t thought much about anything beyond that.
“When I was younger, I had a lot of success early, I climbed the ladder fast, and I probably thought, ‘Well, that’s the way it goes in this thing,’ ” he said. “Sometimes you take that for granted.
“Anything I can do to help the team I’m on, I am willing to do. And we’ll kind of see where it goes. No timelines, no timetables, no agendas. Just try to be a blessing to everybody I can be on the team.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
