COMMENTARY : Giants’ Young, Reeves Were Right

The New York Giants already have won everything they need to win, whether they make the playoffs or not. They finish the NFL season with a quarterback in Dave Brown, and they finish with a chance at the playoffs. George Young and Dan Reeves gambled the whole season when they released Phil Simms, and won.

Simms deserved one more year from the Giants, and deserved to leave on his own terms. When he says they already would be in the playoffs if he were the quarterback, he is right. Maybe they would even be 10-5 instead of 8-7, and fighting with the Dallas Cowboys for first place, instead of fighting the rest of the world for the last wild-card berth.

The Giants come up winners anyway. If they finish with six consecutive victories after seven consecutive losses, if they somehow get to 9-7, this will go down as one of the crazy seasons in their history. Even at 8-8, it would be remembered that way. But after everything that happened to them, after all the interceptions and bad calls and losses, a .500 record is enough. Young and Reeves wanted to start the future right now. They have. They let the rest of us worry about Simms, and the past, and rode the thing out.

This does not mean Young is in the process of building one more Super Bowl team before he retires. It does not mean Young and Reeves get along much better than Young and Bill Parcells did. Maybe the only thing that would make this a really successful season for Reeves is if Young retired at the end of it and Reeves ended up with the whole operation. It does not change that Young and Reeves bet on Brown and won.

There were times during the losing streak when Reeves seemed to be losing his team, and his grip. There were questions about whether Young could still do the job. Here they both are, one game to go, right where they wanted to be when the season started. The whole thing did not fall apart on them and the Giants are alive.

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