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The Jim Fassel Story has everything but logic.

No tale of sound reasoning could have a kid from Anaheim going to the opposite end of the country to realize his dream of being an NFL head coach.

You want improbable? Try this: His New York Giants are atop the NFC East.

And, most amazing of all, Fassel manages to get a small amount of credit, despite being “the other coach” in the same media market as Bill Parcells.

Fassel is the no-name coach of a team with no-name players. There isn’t a first-place team in the NFL that is less impressive. At the same time, none is more surprising.

But Parcells’ return to the Meadowlands with the New York Jets draws most of the attention. The Tuna is made for the tabloid back pages, right down to the headline-friendly nickname. Fassel? You’ll have to look inside the paper, despite the success.

“The way I look at it is, Bill’s done a great job,” Fassel said. “He brings a lot of attention. He’s from here. There’s a naturalness.

“My No. 1 goal is not to be the media darling of New York. My goal is to win a championship. And there’s plenty of media to go around here. His [news conferences] may be packed, but there isn’t much room at mine either.”

When you do your job well in New York, people will start to notice. For Fassel, the measuring stick has been the crowds for his weekly radio show, which is broadcast from the Park Avenue Country Club in Manhattan.

“The first night it was my wife, my son, a couple of friends,” Fassel said. “That was about it.

“Now it’s jammed, it’s packed, they’re hooting and hollering. That, probably more than anything else, makes me feel good.”

The Giants began the season 1-3--”The reasons that every poll picked us to be last place, we were doing,” Fassel says--but they haven’t lost since Sept. 21 and are 6-3 heading into their bye week.

“Maybe by hammering away, the guys started to believe,” Fassel said. “All of a sudden, I saw a cohesion coming to this team. We took away all the reasons to make excuses why we could lose.”

Instead the Giants focus on how they can win, even when they found themselves trailing Cincinnati, 21-10, at halftime Sunday.

“He gave us the confidence that we could come back,” Giant safety Percy Ellsworth told reporters after New York’s 29-27 victory. “In the past we would have started giving up.”

Fassel has the team believing. And when you get down to it, a change of attitude is the most important thing a new coach can bring.

It isn’t playbook wizardry. Fassel is yet another practitioner of the West Coast offense, which nowadays is so widespread a coach would be considered innovative if he didn’t run it.

And Fassel didn’t make the same type of personnel control demands that led to the departure of his predecessor, Dan Reeves (or Parcells’ exodus from New England, for that matter).

Fassel is winning with what was left over. He’s even winning with what he doesn’t have.

Injuries have taken out quarterback Dave Brown, running backs Rodney Hampton and Tiki Barber and wide receiver Ike Hilliard, the first-round draft pick.

At quarterback is second-year Danny Kanell, who is filling in so well for Brown that Fassel is hinting Kanell could keep the job when Brown’s torn pectoral muscle heals. The previously disappointing Tyrone Wheatley has taken over the running duties. On defense, somebody named Mike Strahan leads the team in sacks.

It’s not as if the Giants are dominating anyone. They have outscored their opponents by a total of six points.

But they’re sound in two of the most basic elements of the game: They stop the run (fifth in the NFL in rushing yards given up) and they hold onto the ball (second in the league in turnover differential, at plus-nine).

It doesn’t seem to matter that their six victories came against teams with a combined record of 16-33. The Giants are winning. Their fans like that. They like Fassel. Surprisingly, New Yorkers even recognize him at first glance.

“I was in the city [Monday] night with my family,” Fassel said. “Everywhere we went, people were stopping me. Before, people would come up and say, ‘Are you the coach?’ ”

After 23 years and 12 jobs (if you count the year spent as an unpaid assistant at Fullerton College as a job), Fassel can finally say yes, he is the coach of an NFL team.

He has worked in California, Hawaii, Utah, Louisiana, Colorado and Arizona. Few coaches have stints in the Western Athletic Conference, World Football League and U.S. Football League on their resume. But few coaches can claim some role in the success of John Elway, Phil Simms, Scott Mitchell and last year’s revival of Boomer Esiason. What little reputation Fassel had was for being a quarterback guru.

It’s too bad that by the time he was deemed worthy to be an NFL coach, there wasn’t an NFL team left in his hometown. For Fassel, who grew up just off Harbor Boulevard three blocks from Disneyland and played quarterback at Anaheim High, Fullerton College, USC and Long Beach State, the Rams would have been a perfect team.

“When I was young, they were always the team,” said Fassel, who turned 48 on the first day of the NFL season. “I thought that would be a neat deal to coach the Rams someday. I never thought about coaching the New York Giants.”

Back in the late ‘80s, when Fassel was coaching Utah and Anaheim Stadium still hosted NFL games, his parents implored him to take a job with the Rams--and bring the four grandchildren with him. He explained it wasn’t that easy to break into the NFL. When his break did come, it was as an assistant with the Giants in 1991. He went on to jobs with Denver, Oakland and Arizona.

By the time Fassel was a viable candidate for a head coaching job, the Rams were in St. Louis and his best opportunity was in New York, as strange a pairing as the mellow Fassel and the hyper city might seem.

“So far, I think the fit’s been good,” Fassel said. “When you win, the fit’s a lot easier.”

That doesn’t mean he will never leave.

“Some day I’m coming back to Southern California,” Fassel said. “My wife and I, we have our house in Manhattan Beach. Someday we’ll return there.”

But he’s in no hurry to leave, and the Giants have no intentions to let him go. If he keeps doing this well, he’ll stay well beyond his four-year contract, and by the time he does get back to Southern California, the NFL might even have a team here.

Now that would be an unlikely twist.

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J.A. Adande is a columnist for the Orange County edition of the Times.