The glory days of the post-merger New York Giants came under Bill Parcells, who led the team to two Super Bowl victories with an iron-fisted, no-nonsense approach they have been trying to replicate ever since. Sometimes, you get Tom Coughlin. Sometimes, you get the worst coach in Giants history, Ray Handley.
Before his ill-fated two-season stint in charge of the New York Giants, Handley was viewed as an invaluable assistant who was indispensable to their cause. As the offensive backfield coach of a very conservative, run-heavy offense, Handley played a role in turning players like Joe Morris and veteran Ottis Anderson into championship starters.
After Parcells won his second Giants Super Bowl in 1990, he resigned his position as head coach. General Manager George Young is one of the best to ever do it in the NFL, but his decision to promote Handley while alienating Bill Belichick will go down as one of the more consequential moves in franchise history.
Ray Handley is the worst coach in New York Giants history
For whatever reason, Young thought that Belichick would have been a disaster as a head coach. The two had a contentious relationship, with Young even going as far as to give Belichick negative reviews when other teams would ask about him. Eventually, Belichick would become head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
Young could have promoted Coughlin, then the wide receivers and someone Young held in very high regard, to replace Parcells, but Parcells' decision to wait a while before resigning led to Coughlin taking the head coach role at Boston College. Handley wasn't hired until May.
Handley was a very strict and intellectual coach, as his stops before the Giants included Army, Air Force, and Stanford. However, that same intensity and attention to detail that made him a great position coach didn't translate when overseeing everything.
Handley was unpopular from the jump, as he announced there would be a competition between Phil Simms, who had been the starter for most of the last decade, and backup Jeff Hostetler, who won the Super Bowl after filling in for an injured Simms. Fans were upset, and Hostetler was named the starting quarterback.
Ray Handley started off well, but the Giants coach soon blew it
Handley managed to get fans back on his side, as his first game as Giants head coach was a Monday Night Football win against the San Francisco 49ers in what was a rematch of the 1990 NFC Championship game. However, things went downhill fast as he lost five of his next eight games and slumped to an overall 8-8 record.
Handley's biggest schematic issue was an extremely vanilla passing offense. While the ground game was strong, as running back Rodney Hampton recorded consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, Hostetler (who started 12 games) and Simms (who started four) threw for under 3,000 yards and just 13 touchdowns. Turnovers were avoided, but that came at a cost.
Perhaps his biggest overall issue was how combative he was. Who knew a former Army coach would be one of the more tightly-wound guys in the league? The fact that Handley was this brash on a team that still had Lawrence Taylor speaks volumes.
Handley was not only combative with his players and willing to get very negative in the press, but he wasn't above telling other reporters to "get him straightened out" when another writer asked about how he handled his quarterbacks.
1992 was a disaster for the Giants and Ray Handley
1992 was maybe the most toxic season in Giants history. After defensive coordinator Al Groh left to join Belichick in Cleveland, Handley made a fatal mistake by hiring former New England Patriots head coach Rod Rust to replace him. This is what finally lost him the locker room. This was his Waterloo.
Rust was fresh off a 1-15 season with the Patriots. Under Belichick and Groh, the Giants played a very aggressive style of defense. Rust changed everything, ripping the foundation out and telling players to adapt to his "read-and-react" scheme. Things got so poisonous that players reportedly ignored Rust's calls and made their own plays up in the huddle.
Just two years after ranking first in the league with 13.2 points per game allowed, a Giants team with many of the same players on defense fell to 26th out of 28 teams by surrendering 22.9 points per game. A 13th-ranked offense led to a 6-10 season that forced Hostetler out of town after the Raiders snatched him up. Simms would retire one year later.
Handley was fired and replaced with Dan Reeves. Handley was given a Super Bowl-winning team with one of the greatest defenses in league history, and he ruined them so thoroughly in two years that he had them in the gutter. Reeves would go 11-5 and win a playoff game in his first season in charge.
Ray Handley disappeared off the map after leaving the Giants
Most fired coaches who have sandblasted all their goodwill away will try to return to the league's good graces as a coordinator or position coach, proving that their demise as head coach wasn't due to a lack of coaching acumen. Handley took a different route. He not only left the NFL, but he also never coached again or even gave public interviews.
He was gone. A ghost. A memory of wretched seasons past that appears to haunt the dreams of fans who complain too much about the state of their favorite organization. All that was left was some famously tacky wardrobe choices, horror stories from former players, and the knowledge that the Giants' chance at a dynasty left with Parcells.
Handley now lives in the Lake Tahoe area on the border between Nevada and California. Before the Giants' Super Bowl XLII win against the New England Patriots, Handley, whom Newsday called "the holy grail of ornery, impossible-to-get sports interview subjects," was contacted by a reporter who had unearthed an unlisted phone number.
When called for a quote as part of a Where Are They Now-style interview series, Handley's 48-second phone call was ended with an emphatic message.
"No, I'm not the least bit interested. Thank you very much." And then he hung up.
Handley disappeared to the still waters of Lake Tahoe, leaving a Big Blue train wreck in his wake.