YES, he used the Q- word, and yes, he is sorry he did.
The pressure here can make you crack, or at the very least make you say things you regret.
“There was a lot of job speculation about my job, which there has been five out of seven years,” Jim Fassel said yesterday. “And I was angry. And I said, ‘You guys won’t have to worry about my job status. If we keep playing like that, I’d probably quit before they could fire me.’
“It was stupid. I was angry. Really what I was trying to do, was I was trying to make a point: You don’t have to play for my job. Don’t play this game to save me, go out and play this game to win.”
Fassel used the Q-word behind closed doors one day after his Giants played like they had quit on him against the Falcons. The Giants responded by getting drubbed 28-10 in Philadelphia.
It was suggested that this was quite uncharacteristic of someone who fancies himself a fighter.
“People don’t know me; you guys don’t know me,” Fassel said. “They think I’m easy and all that stuff. I fine guys still right now, and I’m on their [butt] and had ’em in my office … but I don’t try to put it out in public that I’m a tough guy.”
But QUIT? You, of all people?
“Oh no, I’d never quit,” Fassel said. “That’s why I said it was stupid to say.”
The Giants, who have more to worry about than their coach’s job status, are not taking it as a serious threat.
“He’s not a quitter, never has been, never will be,” Michael Strahan said.
“He was pretty much saying if we go out there and perform the way we performed, he’s not gonna let this organization look like that, because he has too much respect for the organization, too much respect for the history of the organization and everything that it entails to go out there and put a team on the field that doesn’t look like it’s really ready to play.”
“His point was there’s no excuse for playing like we played against Atlanta,” Kerry Collins said. “It wasn’t a promise or a threat. It was just to kinda hammer his point across. Certainly you hate that it gets out and it gets turned around a hundred different ways, but I don’t think he’s serious.”
He isn’t doing himself any favors here. The more he brings his job status into the meeting room, the more he sounds like a lame duck. “All the time when your players read your job’s on the line, that can make you powerless, and we’ve fought through that pretty damn well,” Fassel said.
Now he opens himself up to Nice Guys Finish Last charges by giving his emotionally and physically battered players Wednesday off before Monday night in Tampa.
“Last year when we played Philadelphia and beat ’em; remember that last game?” Fassel said. “I gave my guys two days off on a short week.”
The players welcomed the break.
“We’re just not playing like a team that looks like we’re enjoying it,” Strahan said. “We look like we’re playing on a team that has pressure on it and is kinda worried about too many things.”
Such as its Good Guy head coach. “Trust me,” Strahan said, “he’s not nice when he doesn’t want to be.”
I asked Fassel what he would say to Giant fans. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me,” he said. “I wanted this job. And I knew it was probably the toughest job in the league. I wanted it.” This is the roughest it’s been. “So what? Does it look like I’m folding up my tent?” No, that’s why the Q-word was such a surprise. “I didn’t say I was perfect,” Fassel said. “I didn’t say that I don’t say something or do something that I don’t regret. I AM human.”