NY Giants Head Coaching Hire Blunder Lands in New Ranking 

When the New York Giants hired Joe Judge to be their 21st head coach in franchise history, the team hoped he might become the next John Harbaugh, the head coach of the wildly successful Baltimore Ravens, who, like Judge, had a special teams background.

Unfortunately, Judge’s tenure seemed doomed from the start, largely due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the first-time NFL head coach to keep his head on a swivel regarding schedule changes, heightened safety rules, and other challenges. 

Combine that with shaky rosters and Judge’s inexperience as a head coach and his famed media meltdown, and it was a hire that predictably didn’t deliver the results the organization’s ownership had hoped for.

Because of that, Judge, who went 10-23 in two seasons, landed on CBS Sports’s list of the 25 worst coaching hires of this century.

“Was he miscast as a special teams coordinator-turned-head coach, destined for trouble coming from the buttoned-up Bill Belichick-run New England Patriots to the big-market New York Giants?” Cody Benjamin, who assembled the list and had the Judge hire as No. 17, asked.

“Was he unfairly saddled with poor support for new quarterback Daniel Jones? His in-game decision-making didn't appear to help matters, and the minute you insist to reporters that you're not running ‘some clown show,’ well, you're usually past the point of no return.”

As the Giants deteriorated under Judge’s watch, things got even testier behind the scenes. There were reports of him riding his assistant coaches so hard that there were some who couldn’t wait to jump ship.

There was the infamous blowup with offensive line coach Marc Colombo when the two men didn’t see eye-to-eye over how the offensive line was being coached up, a blowup that reportedly led to a nasty verbal exchange in which Colombo reportedly didn’t learn of his firing until he showed up for work the day after the run-in. 

But beyond that famed media rant and Judge’s intensity, which spiraled out of control the more the team’s record slid down the tubes, who could ever forget the ultimate headscratcher under his watch?