Rookie New York Giants head coach Joe Judge has some big shoes to take over this fall in Jersey, taking over a team that has seen five different head coaches win eight NFL Championships or Super Bowls. Of course, Judge also has a low bar to clear to not be the worst head coach in Big Blue franchise history, as eight of the previous 18 coaches to complete at least one full season finished their Giants tenure with a sub-.500 record.
Given that it’s easy to figure out who the best coaches in Giants history are, and given that people like entropy, and given that Steve Lichtenstein looked at the Jets’ most horrible bosses earlier this week, why not give Big Blue an equal go?
These are the worst of the worst, at least for those who spent a full season at the helm (so your 1-3 record is safe, Spags).
No. 5: Alex Webster (1969-73; 29-40-1, .420 winning percentage)Webster, who succeeded a pretty good head man in Allie Sherman, had Big Blue in his veins; he was a Jersey kid from Kearny, spent all 10 of his NFL seasons with the Giants (including four years as one of Sherman’s players), and played in six NFL Championship Games, winning it all in 1956. That all earned him a spot in the team’s Ring of Honor in 2011.
Unfortunately, that on-field success only briefly translated to the sidelines. Two good seasons (9-5 in 1970 while earning UPI NFC Coach of the Year honors, 8-6 in 1972) were sandwiched by three bad ones (12-29-1 in odd years), and he resigned the team went 2-11-1 in 1973, a year that saw them lose 11 of their final 12 and record the second fewest wins in franchise history in a single season.
No. 4: Ray Perkins (1979-82; 23-34, .404 winning percentage)Unlike Webster, Perkins at least led the Giants to the playoffs, as the team went 9-7 in 1981 and beat the Eagles in the Wild Card Round before losing to San Francisco. Also unlike Webster, that was Perkins’ only winning season, as he was 10-22 in his first two years and 4-5 in the abbreviated 1982 season, which was his last.
Perkins did help build the team Bill Parcells took over and led to a Super Bowl title a few years later, but he didn’t do much else as an NFL head coach, either going 19-41 in four seasons (1987-90) in Tampa Bay. He did at least have a little college success, going 32-15-1 in four seasons at the helm at alma mater Alabama in between NFL stops, but to be fair, he did succeed the legendary Bear Bryant there.
No. 3: John McVay (1976-78; 14-23, .378 winning percentage)Sensing a 1970s vibe yet? McVay was the third of four coaches to take the helm in that decade, and also the second-worst, which is a shame given his legend and family coaching tree (Sean McVay, the current Rams head coach, is his grandson).
The eldest McVay had more than two decades of experience as a head coach in the high school, college, and even World Football League ranks when he took over the Giants in ’76, and he’d go on to even more fame for his tenure in the 49ers’ front office in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sadly, though, after going 3-4 in 1976 – a huge improvement given that he took over an 0-7 team at the time – he couldn’t keep the bar raised, going 5-9 in 1977 and 6-10 in the first 16-game season in 1978. He was let go after that season, one which included the infamous to Giants fans “Miracle at the Meadowlands.”
No. 2: Pat Shurmur (2017-18; 9-23, .281 winning percentage)Bad news for Big Blue doom-and-gloomers wondering if it could get any worse: yes, it can, because Shurmur is only the second worst of this bunch of rotten apples. To be fair, the Giants were a team in flux when Shurmur took over in 2017, and the era was wholly marred by the thought of if, when, and why Eli Manning would be succeeded as the team’s starting quarterback.
To be fair to naysayers, though, a lot of people pegged Shurmur as the wrong hire on Day 1, and they were right; after all, the guy had a 9-23 record in Cleveland, too, and those 2011-12 Browns were mostly a dumpster fire for the previous decade since their return to the NFL.
Alas, Shurmur’s time in Jersey was spent entirely on the hot seat, starting when he was 1-7 at the bye in his first season and next to nothing had changed from the previous regime. The G-Men did rebound to win four of the next five, but lost three straight to end 2018 at 5-11, and while he gets a bit of a pass for 2019 being the transition year from Eli to Daniel Jones, the writing was on the wall for Shurmur when the team lost nine straight after a 2-2 start. At least he got to be the coach for Eli’s swan song, a 36-20 victory in Miami that snapped the skid and marked Manning’s final appearance, start, and win as a pro.
No. 1: Bill Arnsparger (1974-76; 7-28, .200 winning percentage)Finishing out the less-than-stellar ‘70s, and rounding out this list, we have the coach that McVay replaced in Arnsparger, who at .200 is officially the worst coach in Giants history. He’s unofficially saddled with that title, too, as Steve Spagnuolo’s 1-3 record as interim head coach in 2017 still carries a .250 percentage.
Arnsparger played for Woody Hayes at Miami of Ohio and had spent nearly a quarter-century as a defensive coach (including three years as Dolphins defensive coordinator) when he suited up to take the reins of a Giants train careening out of control in ’74, and he entered that post fresh off winning two straight Super Bowls and posting a perfect season in 1972 with his “No-Name Defense.”
All that and a dollar wouldn’t even have bought him all the local papers to read about his Giants tenure, though, because it wasn’t worth writing home about. Granted, the team had three different homes over his three different seasons, but they also played like they had just picked up some locals along the way.
The 1974 season, played at Yale Bowl, the team went 2-12, somehow a decline over the 2-11-1 record of the previous year. The 1975 Giants went 5-9 at Shea Stadium, but Arnsparger only got seven games at the new Giants Stadium in 1976, losing them all before being fired and replaced by McVay.
Arnsparger later found better luck in college, going 26-8-2 in three seasons at LSU and cleaning up Florida’s overall athletics program as AD, and he was also the defensive coordinator for the 1994 Chargers team that made the Super Bowl, so at least brighter football days were ahead.