Sources reflect on surprising, rapid downfall of Joe Judge that led to his firing

It didn’t sound like a half-hearted vote of confidence when John Mara publicly stated his full support for his head coach just two and a half months ago. He lavished him with praise and insisted he believed in him as much as ever. Even as recently as two weeks ago, sources in the organization believed Mara’s position on Joe Judge hadn’t changed.

Those were just a very long two weeks.

It was more than just a couple of bad weeks, of course, that led Mara and co-owner Steve Tisch to fire Judge on Tuesday afternoon, but it was still a swift and dizzying fall for the 40-year-old coach. The slide towards the end was filled with self-inflicted wounds and unforced errors as Judge tried to play the bad hand of a flawed and injury-riddled roster he had been dealt.

But he lost control as the team and even the locker room fell apart in a season-ending, six-game losing streak. His firing was as much about the losing, according to multiple sources, as it was about his crumbling public image from his odd, rambling press conferences and a worry that his messages to his players were beginning to fall on deaf ears.

Or, as one team source put it shortly before Judge was fired: “He brought this on himself.”

So how did the Giants and Judge get here, to a point where Mara did something that wasn’t even a thought for him two months ago? Why did an owner who craves stability, who promised patience with this coach, resort to firing his fourth coach in the last six years?

Just 12 weeks ago, this was unthinkable. Mara, in his only public comments since mid-August, was asked by the New York Post if his belief in Judge was still as strong as ever. His response was “It is.” He went on to praise Judge for his leadership and how he’s kept the locker room believing. That was on Oct. 24. The Giants were 2-5, having just beaten the Carolina Panthers 25-3.

They would go 2-2 over the next four games before quarterback Daniel Jones suffered what would turn out to be a season-ending neck injury. But even after two more losses, sources told SNY that Judge’s job was still safe, that Mara “thinks he’s found his (Bill) Belichick or (Bill) Parcells.” Over the next two weeks, several national outlets joined in the chorus, reporting their sources said Judge was safe, too.

So when did it change? One source described it as a “slow burn” during a the six-game losing streak that weighed heavily on everybody. It wasn’t just the losses, the source said, especially since injuries and the loss of Jones were a big part of them. It was how non-competitive the Giants were. They lost those six games by a total score of 163-56.

That’s an average score of 27-9.

And that began to weigh on Judge’s players too. Last Sunday, a report on Fox indicated that were “a lot” of Giants players who wanted Judge fired, even though team leaders were supporting him publicly. A team source said only that players were growing “weary” of Judge’s message and his ability to put them in positions to win.

“I don’t know if they stopped believing in him, but they seemed tired of listening,” the source said. “Losing always makes everything seems worse. But they could see the game plans weren’t working. (The coaches) had no idea how to squeeze anything out of the offense.

“Judge would hammer home the same things, meeting after meeting, but nothing he did ever worked.”

Surely, ownership could see that. Up until about two weeks ago, though, many inside the Giants organization believed Mara wasn’t blaming Judge for what was happening on the field. The Giants were a thin and poorly constructed team built by GM Dave Gettleman, who was already on his way towards a forced retirement. And without Jones, Judge was saddled with a terrible backup quarterback in Mike Glennon, and then an unprepared, recently arrived third-stringer in Jake Fromm.

“He was dealt a terrible hand,” a source said. “The (bad) roster he got, the injuries, it all might have saved him. All he had to do was keep everything under control.”

That was always the caveat from those who said Judge appeared safe – that he was only safe as long as the end of the season didn’t become a total embarrassment and as long as he didn’t lose the locker room. Mara and Tisch could probably handle the losing. They couldn’t handle the Giants turning into a joke.

And that’s what happened, starting with a hideous 34-10 loss at Philadelphia the day after Christmas, when Fromm started and Glennon had to relieve him in the second half. Fromm looked unprepared, and there were internal questions about why Judge started a quarterback who clearly wasn’t ready, according to a source. Another source said some players privately wondered about that, too.

It was the next week, though, where the Giants came off the rails. They looked unprofessional in a 29-3 loss in Chicago when they had one of their worst offensive outputs in more than 20 years – 155 total yards and minus-6 net passing. On the first play of the game, Glennon was sacked, fumbled and the Bears recovered at the Giants 2-yard line. One play later, the Bears scored a touchdown for a 7-0 lead.

Glennon was intercepted on his next pass, too. He ended up with four completions in the game and four turnovers. The Giants decided to abandon the pass entirely, playing an extreme version of old-school football by running on 39 of their 55 plays. They even kept running in the second half, despite being down 22-3.

That was when the tide against the coach really began to turn.

“It was like he gave up,” said one source familiar with the Giants’ situation. “It was like he threw up his hands and said ‘I can’t work with this personnel.’ He’s not wrong. The team he has is terrible. But what coach does that?”

That wasn’t even the worst of that day, though. The more damning thing for Judge came in his post-game press conference where he delivered his memorable, rambling, 11-minute, 2,700-word screed. It came off to many as a plea for his job to his bosses, even though Judge insisted it wasn’t targeted specifically at anyone. Regardless, it landed with a thud on an already angry fan base, coming off as tone-deaf as he spoke glowingly about the progress he’s made that nobody could see.

He also angered his bosses, according to multiple sources, with some of the other things he said. He took an unnecessary, thinly-veiled shot at the Washington Football Team when he said the Giants “ain’t a team that’s having fistfights on the sidelines. This ain’t some clown-show organization.” And he aired some of the franchise’s dirty laundry with a shot at former Giants coach Pat Shurmur, when he said that when he arrived, players told him “It’s not a team. They don’t play hard. Everybody quit. They stopped showing up to captains’ meetings. They tapped out.”

“That did not go over well inside (the Giants offices),” one source said.

Nor did it go over well outside, where Judge was mercifully mocked for his rant. The idea that he would so strongly stress the unseen positives of his regime after a brutal, 29-3 loss to a team that would eventually finish 6-11 and fire its head coach was bad enough. The long-winded, wandering nature of the speech made it worse.

And suddenly the one thing that always had a chance to put Judge’s job in jeopardy was happening: They were becoming the “clown show”.

“It was an embarrassment,” said one source. “The entire league was laughing.”

That was the backdrop for the season finale on Sunday. By then, there was little hope around the Giants that they could salvage any pride with a victory over Washington. Some were just hoping they could get through the game without it becoming a disaster. In the days before the game, several sources who had previously insisted Judge was safe were suddenly second-guessing their information.

No one was sure whether the embarrassment had already become too much for Mara to bear or if he had already made up his mind on his coach. But the scene that day certainly didn’t work in Judge’s favor – with a mostly empty stadium with angry fans screaming for the coach to go.

Of course, Judge’s Giants, with Fromm back at quarterback thanks to an injury to Glennon, were non-competitive again, losing 22-7 and gaining just 177 yards. But Judge made it worse with some of his coaching decisions -- particularly that awful sequence late in the second quarter when the Giants were backed up at their own 2-yard line and rather than attempt to move the ball the Giants called for two consecutive quarterback sneaks on 2^nd and 11 and 3^rd and 9.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said a veteran NFL scout. “They just gave up. (Judge) quit. How can they keep him after that?”

Everyone seemed to be wondering that. The calls to fire Judge had already begun to build in recent weeks, but they became a tsunami after the finale. Even several former Giants players – including Hall of Famer and Fox broadcaster Michael Strahan – loudly advocated for Judge to go. Other former NFL players, coaches and executives in the media added their voices to the chorus, too.

Just how much all that added to Mara’s reversal is unclear. It was obvious, though, that when he met with Judge on Monday morning, his coach was on very shaky ground. Judge – who at one point thought he’d have a hand in the search for a new GM, according to a source, and had been pushing his bosses to promote assistant GM Kevin Abrams into Gettleman’s old job – was suddenly faced with the prospect of having to pitch himself to the Giants owners. He was going to have to sell them on the program he was building if he wanted to stick around.

Mara and Tisch listened to his pitch, which surely included a willingness to shake up the entire offensive side of his coaching staff. When it was over, they agreed to meet again the next day, a source said.

It’s not clear when Mara and Tisch made their final decision, or why they suddenly abandoned what sources said was their intention to let a new general manager weigh in on Judge’s fate. Several of the GM candidates had asked Mara and Tisch if they were going to be forced to keep Judge before they agreed to an interview, according to NFL sources. They were told they weren’t, but maybe the owners saw the writing on the wall.

Whatever it was, the decision was final. On Tuesday afternoon, Mara told Judge he was out.

“I said before the season started that I wanted to feel good about the direction we were headed when we played our last game of the season,” Mara said in a statement released by the team. “Unfortunately, I cannot make that statement, which is why we have made this decision.”

It was a decision that a few months back he couldn’t possibly have seen coming. And it was one that those who know Mara well believe he didn’t want to make. But the public had turned, the players were turning, and the downward spiral of Judge and his program had become too fast to control.

So in the end, Mara did the only thing he could to make it stop.