Even before Tuesday's introduction, John Harbaugh has raised the Giants' expectations
John Harbaugh. Credit: TNS
The Giants will have an introductory news conference for their new head coach on Tuesday.
As if any introductions are necessary.
The whole point of this $100 million investment and recalibration of the organizational infrastructure is that we already know whom they are getting. Ideally, what they are getting, too.
This isn’t about giving us a window into what the new guy is like. We already know. We’ve been following John Harbaugh and his career for the better part of two decades. We saw the way he ran the Ravens on and off the field, how he brought them to the postseason 12 times in the past 18 seasons, how he won Super Bowl XLVII.
We know his roots, his father and his brother, his statue in the Cradle of Coaches at his alma mater, Miami of Ohio, standing among those honoring fellow alumni Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown and Bo Schembechler.
How much has the world noticed this? The gambling website BetOnline.ag — under what it calls “numerous requests” — came out with an early prediction for the Giants’ success next season. On Monday, it announced that the over/under line for wins in 2026 opened at 8.5.
The Giants have won more than six games in a season twice in the last 13 years. In fact, if you count back 8.5 Giants wins from right now, you’d have to go all the way to Dec. 11, 2023. That was the Sunday night when Tommy DeVito somehow managed to help them beat the Packers. Randy Bullock kicked the winning field goal. They’ve lost 30 games since.
Still, there will be a tingle through the building when the moment finally arrives right around noon on Tuesday and the Giants finally can make the public pronouncement they have been itching to make since Harbaugh was fired by the Ravens . . . and hoping they would be given the chance to make before that, even as they began researching options while their own regular season limped to the finish line.
There also might be a sigh of relief that they completed the agreement when they did, doing so on Saturday afternoon and getting signatures on documents Saturday evening.
Had Harbaugh still been on the market Monday when the Bills fired Sean McDermott and that job opened up, would the Giants have looked as appealing to him? Harbaugh has been telling people that coaching Jaxson Dart is a big draw for him with the Giants. Imagine how attractive the opportunity to coach Josh Allen might have been.
It’s been two weeks since this potential match between the Giants and Harbaugh became a thing, almost a week since it became a likelihood, and there have been numerous AI-doctored pictures floating around the web since to illustrate what Harbaugh will look like wearing Giants blue and donning the NY logo. That won’t make it any less surreal to see him in the building and hear what he has to say.
The Giants have never welcomed a coach of such acclaim and resume, so they’ve never had a day like this. The closest comparison is on the player side when they acquired Y.A. Tittle and Fran Tarkenton, quarterbacks who already had reached pinnacles in their careers and then came here to add to their legacies. Neither of them won a championship, by the way.
As for New York football itself, well, this will be a somewhat familiar sensation.
It was less than three years ago that another decorated icon of the sport trotted into town with this much hullabaloo and carrying many of the same promises that Harbaugh has in his Mary Poppins bag of tricks: a new culture of winning, an elevation of standards, the symbolism that things are changing for the much, much better, and the expectations of championships.
It took a while to get used to seeing Aaron Rodgers as a Jet, and unfortunately for them, just when it was starting to set in as a reality, his leg went out from under him and that was that.
It’s a sobering reminder that grand arrivals don’t always equate to grand results. That trophy in the Jets’ lobby that Rodgers referenced with his first official words as a member of the team? It’s still as lonely as ever. Maybe even more so.
The good news for the Giants is they don’t need Harbaugh to maintain a healthy Achilles to complete his task.
Even after Tuesday’s event, there will be adjustments in everything, from the way Harbaugh schedules practices to the way he deals with the media. There will be coaches hired to lead both sides of the ball and scouts who will be reassigned (or worse) with new directives.
The players will have to learn his cadences, his mannerisms, his humor, his anger. And maybe, just maybe, by the time September rolls around, it will all feel natural enough for the Giants — Harbaugh’s Giants — to embark on their first regular season together.
For now, those experiences lie in a future that suddenly is filled with rosy optimism.
Usually at these events, there is talk of “winning the press conference,” getting through the event without making a critical error (such as an oversized suit or darting eyes) while setting the tone for what is to come. The Giants, for the first time in decades, don’t have to worry about coming out ahead in such matters, though.
Win the presser? They already won the hire.
On a cold January day in New Jersey on Tuesday, hearts in the Giants’ facility will melt all the ice in the surrounding swamps, and fans of the organization can pump a fist for the first time in a long time.
The Giants got their guy.
Heeeere’s Johnny!
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.
