The season has yet to start and once again Giants fans are already trying to find a reasonable explanation for all the injuries the team has suffered. For instance, below is just one of the charts floating around depicting an almost supernaturally bizarre discrepancy between the number of injuries the Giants have suffered compared to the rest of the league.
Scapegoats of the Curse
Now if one is old enough, they may recall some seasons where the team was decimated but not at such a consistency for over a decade. And since 2010 various people were held accountable because of injuries.
In 2015, the team had 15 players on the IR. This included three starting offensive linemen for the majority of the season. Two-time Superbowl winning coach, Tom Coughlin was run out of town with an endless barrage of criticism in the papers.
2017 saw 29 Giants spend significant time on the injured reserve, including four offensive linemen. Head Coach Ben McAdoo and general manager Jerry Reece were shown the door. Of course, there were other reasons for these two being fired, but those things may have never occurred on a healthier team.
Head Coach Pat Shumur had 14 players on the IR in 2019 season, before he was jettisoned. In all fairness, their offensive line was comparatively intact. However, the line as well as the entire team generally lacked talent.
Last year 29 players missed significant amount of time and/or were placed on the IR. The offensive line alone was a battlefield triage. Which leaves me to question if Joe Judge and Dave Gettleman would have been given a third year if a healthier team could have squeaked out a few more wins?
Who are we going to blame if this season goes off the rails with the new general manager and coach presently getting rave reviews? To where will the press direct the lynch mob? Perhaps we can stop trying to find some rational solution and simply accept that it is a curse. But for what?
Related: The New York Giants Season Has Already Been Riddled with Injuries
Curses Are Real
Sport curses exist folks, and manifest whenever someone does something extremely unsportsmanlike or a combination of things that brings forth a great amount of ill will from the football gods or the masses. Scoff, if you will, but I will put more faith in the voodoo than many of the out-of-context analytics people toss around. Most of us have heard about the curse of Bobby Lane, the most famous of franchise curses.
“Detroit will not win for 50 years! Exclaimed Bobby Lane when the quarterback was traded away after his third championship season with the franchise. Fifty years went by without a single championship and the last year of the curse culminated with a 0-16 exclamation point.
There are other franchise curses floating around the sports world. Some can be short-term, such as “The Madden Curse.” This has not always been consistent, but anytime you put someone on that type of pedestal involving the greatest team sport, it is to tempt fate.
This is why fans cringed when they heard Vince Young call his 2011 Philadelphia Eagles a “dream team”. You just don’t say crap like that.
Why are the New York Giants Cursed?
The Giants over a decade-long run with injuries has got me wondering. One would think the Chargers, Raiders and Rams deserve some hexing after their bouncing around from city to city but currently one of those teams are the defending champions. The Giants injury woes started in 2010 when they had 14 players on the IR by the end of the season including Victor Cruz.
This could make sense, for there is tons of evidence suggesting that Tom Brady may very well have made a deal with the devil long ago and this was just part of it. But then the Giants beat Brady again in the Super bowl in 2011. But what can we really know when examining the dark arts?
Metlife Stadium
Nevertheless, something did arise in 2010, Metlife Stadium.
Could it be the real curse of Jimmy Hoffa? The joke used to be that the crooked teamster union president who disappeared was buried under Giants Stadium. Perhaps if that were true, he would be greatly annoyed that he has been relocated from the front row to the parking lot.
Now to be fair, the tax payers did not have to pay for the stadium which was recognized as 2010’s “Greenest NFL Stadium” by the Environmental Protection Agency. They seemed to do everything right with the 1.6-billion-dollar stadium. This is much better than said Rams who left the people of St. Louis paying for a stadium they no longer used.
Perhaps, it was selling out the name to an insurance company of all things, but nearly all stadiums are corporate billboards now a days. Though the 400 million Metlife paid did not cover much of the cost and they could have gone the opposite extreme and made it a 9-11 memorial stadium. Something more spirited than a company that sucks your blood.
Conjuring Ill Will Among New York Giants Fans
But if the tax payers did not pay for the stadium, who did? First the Giants canceled the legendary season ticket holders list that started in the 1970’s. That family heirloom you paid annually to stay on to hopefully leave to your progeny as a legacy. Nothing showed love for your family in New York more than that, and they swiped it away. That could produce a lot of spiteful curse-creating feelings among the living and the dead.
In retrospect it may have been a little ridiculous. However, wiping the slate clean and then charging fans “Personal Seat Licenses” was a little callus. The cost of these was between $1,000 and $20,000. The PSL is not the ticket but a fee one pays for the privilege to buy the tickets. Therefore, the general population was not getting taxed, but the fans were getting taxed directly. So much so that many of those who had the season tickets had to give them up or move to worse seats.
The franchise has a habit of acknowledging their loyal “blue collar” fanbase. However, they then made games much less accessible to them, which seemed quite tone deaf. It seemed the new stadium was meant for corporations to buy up seats to use as party favors. Certainly, ticket brokers large and small would not mind paying the PSL’s considering they will double or triple the face value of the tickets. Maybe it’s for those average fans that drive in from North Jersey or the Hamptons. The new deal was certainly not rewarding the blue-collar fan.
New York Giants By the Numbers
1.6 billion is a huge number but let’s look at some other numbers. John Mara is worth 500 million. Steve Tisch is worth 1.2 billion. Woody and Christopher Johnson are worth 6.3 billion. The company that has its name on the stadium grossed $20.712 billion last year alone. The stadium itself is one of the highest grossing venues in the country, perhaps the world. The average income of those blue-collar fans is somewhere between 40 and 50k a year.
They say you have to spend money to make money, why did these people who have lots of money slap their loyal blue-collar fans with the bill? Sure, slap all the corporate luxury boxes but the average fan?
In conclusion, I have no reasonable explanation for the Giants to consistently lose the war of attrition by mid-season. So I will assume that the spiritual residue of Giants stadium, made from the players and fans who have entered the arena for decades, or perhaps buried near by, feel betrayed. That the old blue collar spirit of NYC is no longer respected. It has been replaced with a worship of the Wall Street spirit. This is my story and I am sticking to it. The source of the curse are the PSLs. Someone, maybe even Jimmy Hoffa is turning in their grave and free medium sodas are not going to help.
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