Giants' win is one John Mara and family won't ever forget
New York Giants tight end Daniel Bellinger (82) takes the pass in for a touchdown during the New York Giants vs the Dallas Cowboys football game at MetLife in East Rutherford, NJ, Sunday, January 5, 2026 Credit: Ed Murray
The last time the Giants had a rookie quarterback lead them to a victory over the Cowboys in the regular-season finale was on Jan. 2, 2005, when Eli Manning posted his first NFL victory. It also turned out to be the last Giants game team owner Wellington Mara ever saw in person.
“I can remember walking to the locker room with him afterward and him saying to me, ‘I think we found our guy,’ ’’ John Mara, Wellington’s oldest son and now the team’s president and CEO, recalled many years later at Manning’s retirement ceremony after the quarterback won two Super Bowls. “How right he was.”
Wellington Mara never saw those Lombardi Trophies that Manning won, but John always took comfort in knowing that his father believed the Giants were set in the right direction when he died months later in the fall of 2005.
On Sunday afternoon, another rookie quarterback beat the Cowboys on the last day of the regular season, and John Mara walked into the Giants’ locker room surrounded by his family.
How many more times will he get to do that? It’s hard to tell. Mara has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing treatments, the combination of which left him frail and slow-moving as he made his way from the booth above the field at MetLife Stadium where he watched the game, down the elevator and through the tunnels to see his team after a 34-17 victory.
Here’s hoping there will be plenty more such treks and they will get easier for him.
But Mara and the Giants will have tons of heavy matters to straighten out this coming offseason. A lot is about to change for the team, not the least of which is a coaching search that could be accompanied by huge shifts in the decades-old power structure by which the organization has been run.
With Mara’s health and vitality and ability to remain at the top of that pyramid certainly part of any uncertainty, it’s fair to wonder what these Giants will look like as a team and an organization when they next take the field in September.
No matter what occurs, though, Mara received the same rare gift his father embraced so eagerly almost exactly 21 years ago this weekend.
His Giants beat the Cowboys and he was given a glimpse into the future. No matter what happens from here, like Wellington, John Mara can be reasonably confident the Giants have found their guy at quarterback.
This time it’s Jaxson Dart, who completed 22 of 32 passes for 230 yards and two touchdowns — one of them a fun desperation backhand flip to Daniel Bellinger to avoid a sack — to give the Giants a second straight victory to end an otherwise miserable season and put a halt to a nine-game losing streak against the Cowboys.
Mara was given something else, too. A game ball. Interim head coach Mike Kafka passed it to him to lend an emotional moment to the raucous postgame celebration.
“It’s great to have him around, to have him around the facility and the players and the coaches,” Kafka said. “He brings that energy to the locker room. Talk about toughness and resiliency, he’s the poster child for that. Coming up and continuing to lead our organization, very happy and very proud and very fortunate to work for a man like that.”
Mara is still around the facility, but many of the players have said they missed seeing him as routinely as they had in the past at practices and at away games. The limits to his availability have meant that he and Dart have had to build their relationship in ways beyond face-to-face conversations.
“We talk when we have the opportunities,” Dart said. “We text each other as well. It’s been cool to create that relationship even though he is going through this. I have the utmost respect for him. He is the head of everything and bringing me in here, so I was happy to be able to finish the season with a win.”
Others, too, were glad to see the link to the team’s origins, the grandson of the founder, the latest in more than a century of Maras who have guided the Giants.
“It’s special because we know what Mr. Mara is going through and we know how much he brings to this team as the owner,” Bellinger said. “Seeing him today was really fulfilling for me, and seeing him get the game ball was important. I know he is the toughest guy in here and he didn’t even play a snap today.”
“It is hard to see him like that,” guard Greg Van Roten said of Mara’s physical condition, “but it is good to see him walk around and getting the game ball. That was awesome.”
This was the second time this year that Mara was given a game ball after a home win. The first was on Oct. 9 when the Giants beat the Eagles in a Thursday night game shortly after his diagnosis was made public. Former coach Brian Daboll conducted that impromptu ceremony at the time. The Giants then lost nine straight games before tasting victory again last weekend in Las Vegas. Mara was not there for that game, though. He could only watch from home.
That made Sunday feel much more significant. His brothers, children, grandchildren, they all filed into the locker room. The Tisches were there, too. By the time the speeches started, there may have been just as many members of the large group we tend to call “ownership” as there were actual players who participated in the game.
They certainly weren’t there to toast a four-win season and give the roster and staff a bunch of atta-boys for a job well done.
Everybody wanted to get a piece of the moment, to share it with John Mara. Winning is always the objective. Beating the Cowboys always means more. This one had both of those elements — and then some.
When one doesn’t know how many more days like this there will be, every one of them is deservedly cherished.
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.
