New Giants coach John Harbaugh bringing an old-fashioned overhaul to franchise

There would have been no greater waste of the $20 million a year they will be paying him than for the Giants to hire John Harbaugh   and expect him to turn the organization around based solely on whether they play man or zone defense or if they are aggressive on fourth downs. The Giants’ woes were far beyond that, and they understood it.

That’s why the deal to finalize his arrival in New Jersey, agreed to in principle on Wednesday night and finalized on Saturday afternoon, took so long to complete.

See, they are not hiring a new head coach. They are hiring a new system, a new dynamic for the entire organization. Given the success he has had and the failures they have endured, expecting the Super Bowl-winning head coach to adjust to their ways of doing things would have been idiotic.

The boilerplate language in the standard head coach contracts is out. The boilerplate philosophies within the Giants are going, too. The flow charts and job descriptions that have served the team for about as long as anyone can remember are being shredded.

Harbaugh will be the first head coach since the dark days of the 1970s to report directly to ownership rather than a general manager. He will be the most powerful head coach the Giants have had maybe since Steve Owen.

His resume earned him that privilege. The Giants’ recent flops earned this change for them, too.

None of this was a surprise to the Giants. This wasn’t a snag in negotiations. They knew what they were asking for when they first approached Harbaugh in the hours after he was fired from the Ravens last Tuesday and in the week it took to woo him to accept the job.

And they knew what they were going to have to concede to get it done, too. Being humbled by the past decade in which they made the playoffs twice and still managed to post the second-worst record of any team in the league in that span brought them to this point.

Joe Schoen was always aware that bringing in Harbaugh might require him to lose some of his grip on the organization. That was something he had to weigh as he headed up the coaching search. He could have recommended someone less decorated and gotten to call more shots, but he eventually landed on the side of giving the Giants a better chance to win and a relationship he can work within.

You want to call it desperation? You want to call it clarity? You want to call it a slam-dunk or a Hail Mary pass? Brilliance or buffoonery?

Any and all of those might wind up being correct.

For the team’s key pieces in ownership, including a soon-to-turn 77-year-old chairman in Steve Tisch and a 71-year-old president and CEO in John Mara who in the fall disclosed his cancer diagnosis, this might be their last swing at such a dramatic reorganization.

Each has hoisted Lombardi Trophies, but this could be the final stamps they put on their family legacies, which have been entwined with the Giants since their fathers first partnered up 35 years ago in February 1991.

That’s why it’s been clear from the very beginning that they didn’t want just the guy for the sideline, they wanted the whole package that helped Baltimore become one of the most stable and perpetually competent franchises in the league.

The way Harbaugh’s Ravens used the scouts, the analytics, the assistant coaches, how they saw the players and the opponents — that’s what the Giants believed they needed.

And now that is what the Giants are getting.

It may have taken a few more billable hours than anyone expected, but it’s here now, and the Giants will formally introduce Harbaugh as their new head coach at a news conference on Tuesday.

It will be the most important arrival for the team since 1979, when George Young was hired as their general manager to end an era of comically absurd bad football and remodel the way the Giants had been doing just about everything.

That last turnover didn’t work right away, but eventually it kicked in. By the 1981 season, they were back in the playoffs for the first time since 1963. By 1986, they won a Super Bowl. And since then, with basically an unbroken chain of disciples who can trace their roots back to the 1979 revolution led by Young in the front office and Ray Perkins (followed by assistant Bill Parcells) as the head coach, they have achieved various levels of success.

The Giants fielded a championship team in each of the previous four decades: 1986, 1990, 2007, 2011. They are the only team in the NFL that can make such a claim.

Now Harbaugh — along with whomever and whatever he brings with him — has four years to bring that streak to five in a row.

That, of course, is what the Giants are paying him for. Not just wins, not just playoff appearances, but championship culture and championships themselves.

It’s a high bar for Harbaugh but one that he understands comes with this job in particular. He isn’t coming here to be the new face of the franchise, he is coming here to be the face of the new franchise. It’s his voice and decision-making that everyone is counting on to lead the Giants from their current malaise and usher in the next half-century of football.

It’s he who, whether it works out or flops, will symbolize this next era of one of the most decorated, admired and history-conscious franchises in the sport.

Those responsibilities aren’t spelled out in the dense 50-or-so-page contract he agreed to. It would take months for those clauses to get through legal if they were, and there is a season to start in September! But they’re next to, between and implied in every one of the lines that have been dissected and agreed to these past several days.

The Giants were founded in 1925. George Young came in 1979. Now John Harbaugh comes in 2026.

About every half-century or so, the Giants require a good old-fashioned overhaul.

As Thomas Jefferson once said: A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.