Giants' 10-year Super Bowl XLVI anniversary comes as bittersweet

Besides sacks and tackles and Super Bowl titles, Justin Tuck was known for racking up quite a few keen insights and prescient predictions during his Giants career. A graduate of Notre Dame and Wharton, he’s a very smart man.

But he has likely never been more wrong about anything than he was on May 16, 2012.

That was the night he and the rest of the 2011 champs received their rings for winning Super Bowl XLVI. For many it was their second such token of a title in four years. Tuck was already looking forward to the next one.

And why not? They had a 31-year-old quarterback who was a two-time MVP of the big game, a Hall of Fame caliber head coach and a solid nucleus of players who knew how to win. They were dizzy from success.

"Our thing now is we want to make it a dynasty," he said that night at Tiffany & Co.

Tuck wasn’t alone in that belief. Louis Riddick, now an ESPN analyst on Monday Night Football, was the director of pro personnel with the division rival Eagles in 2011. He was bracing for a very long and sustained run of excellence from the Giants.

"How they were constructed then, how Ernie [Accorsi] had laid the blueprint for Jerry [Reese] to build a sustainable winning franchise, was something that you thought would just carry on and they would continue to restock the football team along those lines," Riddick said. "You just felt as long as that blueprint was executed over and over, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t, that they would always be there."

SEE PHOTOSFeb. 5, 2012: Giants beat Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI

This season the Giants will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of that 2011 Super Bowl-winning team with the solemn recognition that it did not become a dynasty. So much to the contrary, even team co-owner John Mara said he has "mixed emotions" about the season-long tributes that will take place at MetLife Stadium. Sure, they will honor a worthy team, but they will also serve as a reminder of just how miserable the past decade has been and how long the Giants have gone without winning, well, much of anything.

Since they walked off the field in Indianapolis that February night in 2012, having beaten the Patriots, 21-17, they have posted a record of 57-87. Six of those nine seasons have ended with double-digit losses. Only two have ended with a winning record and only once have they reached the postseason, making it as an 11-6 wild-card in 2016.

Few teams have fallen off a cliff like they did. They currently have the fifth longest streak of consecutive seasons without a playoff win following a Super Bowl victory in league history. They have four years to notch that postseason victory or else tie for the fourth-longest with – gasp! – the Jets.

Had someone foretold that future to Mara when he was hoisting the Lombardi Trophy, the one he felt proved the upset win over the previously unbeaten Patriots four years earlier was not a fluke and helped reestablished the Giants as one of the premier franchises not just in the NFL but all of sports, he might have choked on the confetti falling around him.

"There is no way I would have believed that," he told Newsday.

For the players who won that championship, it has been difficult to watch the team struggle.

"It’s getting to the point now where it’s embarrassing," said Chris Canty, a defensive lineman with the Giants from 2009-12 and now a radio host and NFL analyst for ESPN. "As a Giant alum I don’t want to be embarrassed by the franchise I played for. I want them to step up. I want them to be good."

Said David Diehl, the left tackle on the two most recent Super Bowl teams: "It’s been tough for every one of us with the pride we have in the organization and being ‘once a Giant always a Giant,’ as Wellington Mara said. Even though you stepped away from the game you still have that passion and love and understanding of what it takes to bring it to a championship level."

So how did the Giants get here, to the point they are basically celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the last time they had anything to celebrate?

"You have some draft picks that end up not being productive, you have free agents who aren’t as productive as you thought they would be, and that’s a bad combination," Mara said. "Eli obviously got older and we didn’t give him enough to help him, either with the offensive line or with skill players around him. The pass rushers we had started to retire and we weren’t able to replace them. It’s a combination of all of those things. We thought we had it back in 2016, but that was just a mirage I guess."

Riddick said the Giants’ inability to restock their strengths — a dominant offensive line and "waves and waves" of pass rushers — in the draft classes from 2011-14 led to their downfall. A string of busts that included Marvin Austin, DeMontre Moore and Jay Bromley were unable to become the next generation of line of scrimmage enforcers. Throw in skill position picks that didn’t work out like David Wilson and Rueben Randle and, despite his dynamic abilities, even Odell Beckham Jr., and 10 years without a playoff win goes by pretty quickly.

"You saw the cracks and the foundation starting to deteriorate," Riddick said. "That goes a long way toward explaining how things crumbled… You can see where the decay took place. The guys who drove the bus for that [2011] team, the guys who made the Giants who they were, they were never replaced."

Added Carl Banks, a Super Bowl champion of the previous generation and the team’s radio analyst for the past 14 years: "When you can’t keep your roster the way you want it, when you don’t draft the way that you should to supplement and complement the strengths of your team to protect the areas that are starting to get weak, that’s what happens. When you allow an offensive line to age and not put people in the reserve who are able to step up and develop and move forward into a starting role, that’s what hurts teams."

Not everyone has a concrete reason for the despair.

"It was the football gods, they just weren’t in our favor," wide receiver Victor Cruz sighed. "Things happen. Injuries happen. Our timing wasn’t right. So many things have to go in your favor throughout each season to be successful. Those next couple of years just weren’t for us."

The one thing the past decade has taught many of those who will be feted in the coming months is just how special their championship season was. The fact they were 9-7 in the 2011 regular season and won the division and the Super Bowl then had the exact same 9-7 record the following year but didn’t even make the postseason illustrates how thin the line can be between parades and pouting, rings and ruing.

"It shows you how difficult it is to win in the NFL," said Kevin Boothe, the starting guard for the team. "It’s very easy to assume that you are going to be in the playoffs or you’ll win 12 games or be in the divisional championship every year, and you quickly realize that it’s not very easy. What we saw in New England, that’s an anomaly. The difference between winning and losing at this level is so thin and a lot of things have to break your way for you to ultimately win the Super Bowl."

Did he recognize that at the time?

"Probably not as much as I should have," he said. "Once you win it or you win twice you say ‘That was fun, let’s do that again.’ The more time you are removed from it the more your appreciation for it grows and you realize how truly difficult it is to achieve those things."

There is one thing nearly all of those who will be returning to the stadium this year seem to agree on, that the Giants are headed in the right direction. They all like Joe Judge — perhaps because he reminds them of Coughlin — and they are fond of the foundation he is building.

"I think the team is in a good position now to turn that page," Cruz said. "On paper they have a team that is competitive, I feel like it’s a team that can go out and compete at a high level."

That certainly would help take the sting out of the celebrations that are on the calendar for the rest of this year.

"It is a very stark reminder for me and a lot of people in our organization that things have not gone well since that season ended," Mara said of the 2011 reunions. "It has been a very painful stretch. It makes it all the more important that we start winning games."

That’s a far more humble mandate than Tuck’s desire to become a dynasty. But it reflects what has been a far more humbling decade than anyone could have imagined.

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.