It’s not easy to walk into the New York Giants as a first year head coach. The fans are demanding, the team has been losing and the expectation is to bounce back quickly, and the previous head coaches to try their luck with the Giants had quick exits after mediocre tenures. For Joe Judge, who has never been a head coach or a coordinator on offense or defense, it has to be an intimidating challenge.
But there’s a lot of people rooting for Judge. Some of them include great figures from the franchise’s past. That includes Bill Parcells, who has plenty of experience coaching the Giants and dealing with the unique challenges.
Parcells recently spoke to the New York Post and gave some advice to Judge, and it looks like advice worth following.
Simple advice from Bill Parcells to Joe Judge
“Be yourself.”
That’s the advice that Parcells had for Judge. It’s simple, but not always easy to follow through with. After all, given the situation Judge is walking into, there’s no shortage of external pressure to be someone else.
According to Parcells, his own struggles early into his career as the Giants head coach came from not following that advice.
“I was just trying to be a head coach instead of being Bill Parcells,” he said.
It remains to be seen what it looks like to truly ‘be Joe Judge.’ We’ve never seen Judge coach a team before, at least not from the head coach position. Judge has worked on special teams and with wide receivers for both Alabama and New England, but coaching special teams is a different ball game from coaching an NFL franchise.
Parcells believes that experience and continuity is one of the main factors in success for a coaching staff – the Giants have some experienced figures on their own staff, but they fall more on the unknown side in terms of results. There are no results yet from this coaching staff. As Parcells says, it’s hard to know how the head coach will operate.
“Those coaches have been through the drill with their assistants. Their assistants know what to expect. It’s all new for these other guys that just put their staff together. And even if you have veteran coaches, you never know how the head coach is gonna operate exactly. It’s a difficult thing,” Parcells continued.
He mentioned that the Giants are only set to have 14 padded practices before their first game compared to 50, back when Parcells was coach – there’s less chance of injury this way, but also less of a chance for the team to prepare during a year with no preseason to warm up with.
The Giants are set to take on the Steelers on the 14th of September. No fans will be in attendance, assuming the game does happen as scheduled. It’s not a long way off. And it’s quite the significant game. After all, the first impression under a new head coach will likely matter a great deal.