And Now for Something Completely Different: Sort of
Why the Giants and Jets are Poster Children of Organizational Dysfunction
Snead, Morton, Johnson, Del Gaizo, Golsteyn, Dean, and Pisarcik. Although they could be the names of an injury attorney law firm with billboards on the side of the highway, they are not. They are the starting quarterbacks of the NY football Giants of my youth.
Keep in mind, these men played at the same time that Bart Starr, Len Dawson, Johnny Unitas, Roger Staubach, Bob Griese, Terry Bradshaw, Fran Tarkenton, and Ken Stabler were helping to popularize the modern game.
How is it that the leading team in the country’s biggest city couldn’t land a quarterback?
The answer lay at the top: two names, Wellington Mara and Jack Mara. They inherited the team from their father Tim, who bought the franchise for $500 in 1925. Although football was the family business, they weren’t very good at it. In fact, they were catastrophically bad at football. We were not allowed to mention their names in our house. Especially on Sundays in the 1970s.
At one point in 1978 it got so bad that a group of fans hired a plane with a banner that read “Fifteen Years of Lousy Football – We’ve Had Enough.”
The low point of the Wellington Mara era was a game that I remember vividly and is forever etched in my memory because I was on the couch with my dad who unleashed a wave of unmatched and obscure profanity that sent me to the dogeared family dictionary to clarify the meaning of some of the words unfamiliar to my 13 year old self.
The Giants were on the verge of winning. They led 17-12 with 30 seconds left in the game. Inexplicably, rather than taking a knee and running out the clock, the Giants decided to call a running play. Quarterback Joe Pisarcik missed the handoff to Larry Czonka and the football fell hopelessly to the Giants Stadium turf. Eagles defensive back Herm Edwards, playing to win the game, scooped up the ball and ran for a touchdown.
That one play—a profound failure of basic coaching and organizational discipline—was not an accident. It was a symptom of deeper managerial rot.
Something had to be done. The league is, with the possible exceptions of the Cali cartel and Disney World, the most efficient way of separating Americans from their money. The owners share revenue collectively for media and merchandise sales, and it was bad for business to have an unsuccessful team in the nation’s largest city.
After fifteen years of sub-par results, Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, stepped in. He inserted himself between the two feuding Mara brothers and suggested that they hire a professional football man to lead the team.
Enter George Young
Young had been on the staffs of both the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins. He demanded full authority over football decisions—authority that Wellington Mara had held personally for decades. He got it. From 1979 through 1995, Young signed every player he drafted, 119 in total. He controlled the coaching staff. He ran the draft. This wasn’t consultation with ownership. This was delegation of real power.
Young was supremely successful, winning two Super Bowl championships elsewhere. He brought in Head Coach Bill Parcells, linebacker Lawrence Taylor, and quarterback Phil Simms, and constructed a hard-nosed team that won by playing ferocious defense and error-free offense.
But The Loop Fought Back
After Parcells’ first season—the team went 3-12-1—Wellington Mara secretly contacted Howard Schnellenberger, who had just led Miami to a national championship. He wanted Schnellenberger to replace Parcells.
Young knew nothing about it. Neither did Parcells—until Schnellenberger’s agent called Parcells directly to tell him his boss was trying to fire him behind his back.
Mara didn’t trust the system Young had put in place. His instinct was to override professional judgment—because he was the owner and he could. When Schnellenberger turned down the position, Young kept Parcells. John Mara later admitted: “Had Schnellenberger said yes, Parcells would’ve been fired at the end of the ‘83 season, something I know Bill was bitter about for years to come.”
By staying the course, Young broke the cycle. Three years later, the Giants won the Super Bowl.
When Young retired, Ernie Accorsi maintained the system and won two more Super Bowls. The recipe was clear: professional management, coaching excellence, organizational accountability.
Once Accorsi retired in 2007, the system failed. John Mara runs the team now. The planes have returned.
The Maras reinserted themselves as the primary voice in football decisions. Multiple reports indicate that major roster moves—the Odell Beckham Jr. contract, Eli Manning’s $23.5 million option—were made by the family rather than the nominal GMs. Behind three general managers and five head coaches, the team has produced a winning record only twice since 2012. Daniel Jones, their sixth overall pick in 2019, flamed out in five years of organizational chaos. He’s now thriving in Indianapolis. The Giants didn’t have a Daniel Jones problem. They had a Giants problem—the same problem we’ve seen in the war on drugs and the war in Afghanistan. Organizations develop peripheral blindness that protects the status quo and shields leaders through misaligned incentives.
This managerial centralization—the owner acting as the de facto final football authority—is the corporate equivalent of what happened at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, where Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s reliance on systems analysis led him to micro-manage battlefield decisions from thousands of miles away, bypassing and overruling experienced military professionals.
And here’s why The Loop persists: the Maras can’t be fired. The NFL’s revenue sharing model guarantees profitability regardless of on-field performance. The franchise value has risen from $500 to over $7 billion—despite decades of losing. There is no market accountability. The Maras profit whether they win or lose.
The Jets: Same Stadium, Same Disease
The Giants share MetLife Stadium with the New York Jets, and the two franchises share something else: ownership that can’t get out of its own way.
Woody Johnson bought the Jets in 2000. In the quarter century since, the Jets have made the playoffs four times, won zero Super Bowls, and are the only franchise in NFL history to go fourteen consecutive years without a playoff appearance.
Where the Maras’ dysfunction manifests as nepotism, Johnson’s manifests as addiction to quick fixes. He chases splashy moves—trading for Brett Favre, signing Tim Tebow, acquiring Aaron Rodgers—rather than building systematic excellence. Each move is a point solution to a systemic problem.
The Jets fire coaches the way day traders sell stocks—at the first sign of trouble, always certain the next pick will be the winner. No system has time to take root. No culture can develop. Same stadium. Same disease. Different symptoms.
The Steelers: Family Ownership Done Right
The Pittsburgh Steelers prove family ownership isn’t the problem. The Rooney family has owned the Steelers since 1933—longer than the Maras have owned the Giants. They have six Super Bowl championships, the most in NFL history.
The difference is structural. The Rooneys delegate actual football authority to professionals. Art Rooney II serves as team president, but he doesn’t pretend to be a football expert. He hires football people—and trusts them.
Since 1969, the Steelers have had three head coaches: Chuck Noll (23 years), Bill Cowher (15 years), and Mike Tomlin (18 years and counting). Three coaches in fifty-six years. The Jets have had eleven in twenty-five.
The Rooneys understand something the Maras and Johnsons don’t: family ownership is about stewardship, not control. Their job is to hire the right people and create conditions for excellence—then step back. Pittsburgh hasn’t won a Super Bowl since 2009, but they’ve had a losing record exactly once in the last twenty years.
The Steelers prove that The Loop isn’t inevitable. Family ownership can work—but only when the family has the self-awareness to recognize the limits of their own expertise.
Three ownership models. Three outcomes
The Steelers: family ownership with delegated authority. Six championships.
The Giants: family ownership with reasserted control. Four championships under professionals, dysfunction when family takes over.
The Jets: individual ownership addicted to quick fixes. Zero championships under Woody Johnson.
The Loop doesn’t discriminate. It distorts reality for politicians, CEOs, and billionaire football owners alike. The only immunity is institutional discipline—and the humility to trust the people you hire.
Chris Mara’s DNA doesn’t contain a gene that guarantees success in the NFL Draft. The Giants’ and Jets’ struggles are indicative of the organizational dysfunction we see in government and business, where commitment to pedigree and impatience supplant accountability.
The Maras had the blueprint. George Young gave it to them. They chose not to follow it.
That’s The Loop.
Great article on the history and paths of the big city franchises organizational dysfunction.