John Mara has butchered Giants fans’ faith – and now must answer for it

This was almost 10 full years ago, Super Bowl week in Indianapolis, and John Mara was basking in the magnificence of another improbable January run into February. In a few days, Eli Manning would connect with Mario Manningham, and a last-ditch prayer from Tom Brady would fall harmlessly in an end zone at Lucas Oil Stadium. 

For now, Mara was simply enjoying the moment. Every bit of it. Every ounce. 

“I’m a fan, so I know these things don’t happen every year,” he said that day. “At the end of the day, I want our fans to always know that I’m really just one of them. I suffer when the team suffers and I feel like the top of the world when we win.” 

That has long been the unique charm of the Mara ownership. Most owners come to pro sports from somewhere else, making enough of a fortune to buy in. George Steinbrenner built ships first. Steve Cohen built hedge funds. The Garden teams have been owned by a litany of corporations and conglomerates. Woody Johnson is the scion of a pharmaceutical giant. 

The Maras have been about the Giants, and only the Giants, since Tim Mara bought them for $500 in 1925. Technically, the Mara family owns only half of the team, and their partners, the Tisches, have had other successful interests. But John Mara is still the spiritual head of the franchise. He is still Wellington’s son, and Tim’s grandson, and Jack’s nephew. 

He still speaks with great passion — and greater anguish — of being a Giants fan in the dark corridors of the 1960s and ’70s. He saw his father struggle. He endured his classmates’ taunts. He knows how much lousy football teams — extended lousy eras — hurt. He’s been there. He’s seen it up close. 

Now, more than ever, he must look at this team through his fans’ eyes. He must see what they’ve endured these last five years. He must wear, as they wear, the 100 losses since the last Super Bowl victory. He must see that there were tickets available to Sunday’s grotesque season finale with the WFT for $6 — $6, after decades of Giants’ tickets being more unavailable than a table at Rao’s. 

He must see this through the eyes of the few thousand true believers who did show up Sunday, to watch Washington provide one final trampling of the 2021 Giants, 22-7, all of those fans freezing and damp, a few with paper bags over their heads, some bearing signs, many wearing jerseys — 56, 10, 92 — reflecting better days. So many better days. 

The very best owners are supposed to be sober, clear-eyed arbiters of their team’s fortunes, unmoved by the whims and whimperings of the moment. It is rarely a good thing when owners are moved by public consensus. But this is different. The Giants are different. Mara himself has always called his family’s stewardship a “public trust.” And Sunday, from start to finish, was an example of just how lost this franchise is, just how detached it is from its fans. 

And how much that trust has been butchered. 

It started with Dave Gettleman smiling on the field, taking carefree family photos on what was surely his last day on the job, images that quite literally sneered at fans who have been disillusioned by his horrifying work as GM. It ended with him refusing to answer questions as he left the press box, one final spasm of unaccountability after a tenure of smarter-than-you smugness around which we can finally tie a numeric ribbon: 19 wins, 46 losses and barely a buck three-eighty left in salary cap space. 

Then came the game. There was, of course, the unforgivable give-up sequence late in the second quarter, the Giants deep in their own territory, where on second-and-long and third-and-long they went into a formation that actually looked like victory formation — three running backs guarding the quarterback — before Jake Fromm snuck it both times. 

(If we take on faith that the worst moment in franchise history was The Miracle of the Meadowlands back in 1978, this was an immediate candidate for No. 2.) 

From there was a blur of play-out-the-string awfulness: Kenny Golladay’s alligator-arms refusal to lay out for probably the finest ball of Fromm’s career; the defense’s unwillingness to even ponder tackling Antonio Gibson on his game-clinching touchdown run in the fourth, and a general sense of malaise by the allegedly never-say-die band of Big Blue football warriors. 

“Our fans deserve more than they got this year,” Giants coach Joe Judge said. “Our team deserves more than it accomplished this year.” 

He’s half-right. The players, most of them, deserve exactly what this 4-13 record reflects. So does Judge. Gettleman? Let him enjoy his place in history alongside Isiah, Phil, John Idzik and every other awful GM who’s ever tried to ransack New York fans of their loyalties. 

But the fans? He’s damn right you deserve better. He’s damn right there can’t be another day like this day, this white-flag disgrace of a day ending this grisly hot-mess marathon of a season. There is one fan who must recognize this, because he lived through this before. John Mara may only own 50 percent of the team. But 100 percent of his soul bleeds blue. 

Now he must answer for that.