It's a good thing that most of you, the fans, are not savages.
You're not the chest-thumping, wing-chomping, beer-chugging barbarians that the hipsters make you out to be. You care about teams, players, and people. So when you heard that Pat Shurmur was canned Monday, you do care that it hurts the coach, his family, and his assistants. You know the nomad life of the NFL lifer. Contracts are signed in pencil, deals are as binding as a wet napkin, and moods change like the wind.
So it's not a good day to say goodbye to Pat Shurmur as head coach of the New York Football Giants. The weather is as wet, windy and ugly as it was on Sunday, when the Giants plodded through the soupy field and lost, again, the Philadelphia Eagles - a game that symbolized the Giants sloppy play this year, and likely sealed Shurmur's fate.
The patron saint of the Meadowlands, Bill Parcells, long ago told us that you are what your record says you are. Even if Pat Shurmur is a kind man or a decent man or a smart man, or all the above, the main metric of any NFL coach is his record. To that end, Shurmur was 9-23 in two seasons with Big Blue, including a nine-game slide that made keeping him as coach almost impossible. As Jerry Recco asserted Monday morning, if the G-Men go 2-7 instead of 0-9 then Shurmur is probably the coach tomorrow.
But you can't go 5-11 then go 4-12 with more of your kind of players, a better quarterback, and another season of your sermons. You can't praise the younger roster before the season, and then complain about the youth at the end of the season. Saquon Barkley may have accidentally issued the death warrant when he said the Giants find new ways to lose football games. And that speaks to coaching. So while it's never a good time to fire the coach, it was the right time.
You can lose to the Vikings, Patriots and Packers. But don't lose to the Cardinals, Lions, and the 1-7 Jets. Don't lose four games to the Eagles and Cowboys when the NFC East is the weakest, most delicate division in the league — the only one with a 9-7 champion. Don't let Arizona jump out 17-0, at home, in the first quarter, when you've had ten days to prepare. Don't blow a 17-3 halftime lead in the first game against Philadelphia; and don't let Boston Scott morph into Walter Payton in the second game.
The only thing the Giants - and Shurmur, presumably - got right was benching Eli Manning for Daniel Jones, and then letting Eli get his last-game jubilee, one more win for the team's ultimate winner. The rest was a montage of misses and losses and regrets.
More than the cold calculus of wins and losses, Shurmur never had the aura, or the fearful respect from the players or the press. Some men walk into a room, in front of a camera, or into your television and own it. You can't stop looking or listening because he's got the passion and purpose. He's a leader, equally gifted with the carrot and the stick. Bill Parcells had it. Bill Belichick has it. Pete Carroll has it. Pat Shurmur does not.
So on an ugly December day, in those lost hours between Christmas and New Year's Eve, the NFL slides Black Monday onto our plate. Now the Giants end a forgettable season with a regrettable decision. Coaching in the NFL is a privilege no matter how ugly the move is. So you must earn your keep on a yearly, if not monthly, if not weekly, basis. There are 32 such jobs on the planet, yet there are barely 15 manned by men with the skill and hardihood to be an NFL head coach.
The people paid good money to watch the Giants play, and the Giants paid good money to watch Pat Shurmur coach. Neither group got their money's worth. Pat Shurmur is a good man, and has a fine football mind. He's just not an NFL head coach.
Follow Jason on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
