The Giants and Falcons have emerged as the frontrunners in the John Harbaugh sweepstakes. While the Falcons were quick to announce this evening that they completed an interview with the head coaching candidate, the Giants are also making it clear that they’re aggressively pursuing the former Super Bowl winner.
[RELATED: Falcons Meet With John Harbaugh]
Giants executive Chris Mara told Ian O’Connor of The Athletic that he met for lunch with Harbaugh yesterday and had an “informal meeting” at the coach’s house. O’Connor adds that sources from both the organization and the coach have made it clear that Harbaugh “remains very interested in the Giants job.”
This in-person meeting follows a 30-minute conversation between Harbaugh and Giants GM Joe Schoen last week, per Paul Schwartz of the New York Post. ESPN’s Jordan Raanan echoes that Schoen spoke with Harbaugh about the Giants head coaching job.
Depending on who you ask, this may have been the first sit-down that Harbaugh’s had with a potential suitor. While the Falcons themselves reported today that they definitively interviewed Harbaugh, Paul Schwartz of the New York Post says their “interview” was merely a “phone conversation.” In fact, Schwartz compared the conversation to the calls Harbaugh has fielded from other potential suitors. The reporter adds that the Giants will have a formal sit-down with Harbaugh later this week or early next week.
While it may be semantics, Mike Garafolo of NFL Network’s categorizes Harbaugh’s meeting with the Falcons today as a “virtual” conversation, which included Matt Ryan and other Atlanta execs who have been involved in the search. This would seemingly qualify as an official interview, although the Giants may have an issue with that positioning.
If there’s any takeaway, the Giants clearly want us know that they’re serious about their Harbaugh pursuit. On the flip side, we’re plenty aware that the court of public opinion will have no bearing on where the coach lands, no matter how hard the Giants may try.
Informal as in: “Please, please help us…we are a desperate mess but we can get you good tickets to Yankees and Knicks games”.
The Knicks — the team Theo Johnson watched from courtside after getting sent home for Week 18 through illness.
Props to PFR and the lemon for helping expose how entitled the football Giants are.
You regularly expose how obsessed the Jets are with their bigger, more successful co-tenant. Always playing second fiddle, always crying about the Giants.
Also the dictionary is still waiting for you to use it to look up what ‘entitled’ means.
If you can’t win games at least win the headlines.
John Mara & Steve Tisch were much better owners than their kids.
If Steve Tisch and Julia Koch are smart, they’ll get rid of all the Mara children in the Giants’ front office.
It’s simple math: (Tisch + Koch) > Mara.
Absolutely correct…I’ve been saying that for the past couple of years…kick the whole family out of the day to day….Chris Marra is the guy who screws up player personnel and college draft decisions….Scheon can’t dare cross him…clean house…
I must be in the minority here, but is anyone else of the opinion that John Mara is not as bad as owner as he’s been portrayed as being? I think that he is too reliant on bad advice, but I do think that he has, at least, a desire for the team to be successful. He has intervened in team decisions, but not nearly as excessively as the bottom tier of owners with which he is compared. I would put him in the Khan category of “misguided, but not morally corrupt or bad intentioned” level of ownership, personally.
Good owners truly are few and far between, and it’s not completely correlated with wins and losses. Luck in hiring seems to play a bigger role for owners than other positions in football. Most don’t have football expertise to help weed out candidates or augment their decision making (which is why meddlesome owners tend to be unsuccessful owners). Arthur Blank, for example, puts money into his team and community, has good relationships with players by the looks of it, and seems to give a necessary leash to his staff without going too overboard. However, he relies too much on bad advisors (like Rich McKay), so he’s not in the top due to that. I would probably consider Mara, in my opinion, under him as one of losing team owners, but he’s definitely not on the level of a Johnson, Tepper, Adams, Spanos, or Bidwell.
Yea I agree. I don’t get the gate he gets, he doesn’t meddle he’s stays behind the scenes. Problem is they’ve been so bad everyone is taking heat. Throw in they play in the largest market, it gets magnified. Unfortunately most people don’t develop their own opinions, they read something and run with it