John Harbaugh hire means Giants must be taken seriously again

Because we get to kick them around and mock them for their many stumbles on a near-daily basis around here, we often lose sight of the significance the Giants hold in league circles. We’re too close to them to appreciate what they mean to others.

So when lists come out that rank job openings and the Giants are almost always at or near the top regardless of the current state of the franchise, it’s easy to scoff and dismiss that sentiment.

When outsiders extol the young talent on the roster, we look at the same players and say, meh, other teams have better.

The Giants? Our bumbling Giants? There is no way anyone would want to come here to work or play for them!

But every once in a while, the team is able to remind us of who they actually are and allow us to see them through someone else’s eyes. They flex those century-old, tired, big-market muscles, climb up on that marquee franchise podium and lurch into a fighting stance.

Then we recognize it. And we start to remember, too. We call them by their full given name, middle one included — the New York Football Giants — the way we do with our kids when we want to gain their attention and let them know this is serious.

This week gave us one of those times, rare of late but made all the more special, perhaps, by the lack of regularity.

There are no games for them to play, but the team that won only four times this past regular season and seven times in the past two has the eyes of the sports world upon it. It has managed to do the unthinkable and overshadowed the run-up to the actual contests that will take place in the playoffs this weekend, knocking those teams out of the news cycle . . . at least until kickoff.

Instead of watching from the sidelines, it makes the Giants part of the January buzz that the NFL generates annually. And it has allowed us to see the Giants the way John Harbaugh sees that N-Y logo, not as a sea of ineptitude and a symbol of incompetence and a mess of a roster, but as the regalia of onetime kings that resonates still.

He looked at Jaxson Dart and Malik Nabers and the rest of the downtrodden players whom we pummel and nitpick, and he saw talent with which he believes he can win. He met with a general manager who many called on to be fired, who many more believed would be an impediment to landing a quality candidate as head coach, and he understood that working with someone does not mean working for someone.

Harbaugh is coming here, and he is doing it by choice.

The Giants are back, and it’s by their choice, too.

This certainly isn’t the old way of doing things for the often cobweb-clad organization. Never in their history have they hired a head coach who had won a championship elsewhere. Usually they bring in someone — often from their own family lineage going back to Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick — and try to recapture glory. This time they are trying to redefine it.

The closest they ever came to doing that was when they brought in Dan Reeves in the 1990s after he led the Broncos to a Super Bowl. But every other coach before Harbaugh arrived here with an empty trophy case.

Now he comes to town with the resume of a winner, and the Giants will ask him to make them winners again, too. It’s a different dynamic. After whiffing on the last few hires, most of them with little to no head-coaching experience at any level, it’s a much-needed change.

So many of the great “decisions” in Giants history have been accidental. They wanted to get rid of Parcells after one bad season, and Howard Schnellenberger’s reluctance to leave Miami saved them from that fate. There were some who were disappointed when the Saints selected running back George Rogers with the first pick in the 1981 draft, including the player the Giants wound up taking second overall who had telegrammed them with the warning that he didn’t want to join them. Enter Lawrence Taylor.

The most iconic play in team history, a blind desperation throw down the middle of the field, is exactly what every coach and analyst will say a quarterback should not do in any circumstance because it is almost certain to be intercepted. But Eli Manning did it, David Tyree pinned it to his helmet and they both became legends.

This isn’t like those. This is deliberate. The Giants saw something they wanted and doggedly went after it. They shoved their way to the front of the line and made sure they got theirs before anyone else had a chance to study the menu.

There is no guarantee it will work. No coach has ever won a Super Bowl, then won a second one elsewhere. But the Giants have never tried this approach and hope Harbaugh can become the first (assuming Sean Payton does not beat them to it with the Broncos in about a month’s time).

In a league that is skewing more toward younger and more creative head coaches, the Giants have hired a 63-year-old who tells tales of Bo Schembechler and Ara Parseghian.

If it comes close to fulfilling its promise, this week will resonate.

There will be bumps along the way, moments when we will go back to flicking dirt on them and using them as punchlines. We’ll revert to lowered expectations and doomsaying prophecies. That’s what being in such day-to-day proximity to a team will do to you.

For now, though, enjoy seeing the Giants as others see them. They are reborn, returned to being the NYFG.

That’s New York Football Giants . . . but feel free to substitute another word in the middle of that acronym if you like.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.