Tiki Barber Threatens to Ban WFAN Callers Who Say the Giants Should Tank

Matt Yoder at Awful Announcing transcribed a portion of a WFAN segment on Tuesday in which Tiki Barber threatened to ban Giants fans who call up and say the team should tank:

“You don’t try to lose, dude,” Barber said. And he was just getting started.

“That’s the most ridiculous phone call I’ve ever heard in my life. No player or coach is ever going to try to lose a football game. And if someone calls this station again and says they should lose a game I’m hanging up on you and banning you from the station. It is the stupidest, most ridiculous thing I’ve ever freakin’ heard. So stop saying ‘lose games, lose games so you can draft higher.’ The draft is not a guarantee. Rookies suck too by the way. So forget thinking you’re’ going to change your franchise by losing games. It doesn’t work that way, because you end up firing people, everybody has a negative connotation about the organization, free agents don’t come, and it all starts because you want to lose one game.”

Players always have the same attitude on tanking. No player (or coach) is ever going to try to lose on purpose, unless they are secretly match fixing like it’s the Italian Serie A. Jason Kelce, Seth Joyner, Joe Judge, and Dan Orlovsky all criticized the Eagles for throwing the last game of the 2020 season. Sal Pal threatened to put on his Kenesaw Mountain Landis pants and begin a forensic investigation. They were all thinking with their hearts at the time, while the orchestrators were thinking with their minds, and the result of tanking one single game was the difference between pick #9 and pick #6 in the 2021 draft, which sparked a series of Howie Roseman moves that saw the Eagles land both DeVonta Smith and Jordan Davis. They quickly rebuilt, went to two of the next four Super Bowls, and won their second Lombardi Trophy.

In that case it worked, because the Eagles did a one-time, one-game fix to right the ship. They didn’t sustain any kind of “culture of losing” or damage to the locker room. It had zero impact on any of that.

The funny thing about Tiki saying “you don’t try to lose, dude” is that trying to win has not gotten the Giants anywhere either. They’ve had one winning season in their last eight, when they stumbled into overachievement during Brian Daboll’s first year, found themselves way ahead of schedule, and mistakenly thought Daniel Jones was the guy. Then they went from nine wins, to six, to three, and if you’re not winning enough games or losing enough games, then you’re just sort of sitting there in purgatory. A lot of players and coaches would happily be in purgatory while honoring the integrity of the game, when, in fact, strategic and focused tanking, within reason, can steer a franchise in the right direction. For a recent example see: Thunder, Oklahoma City.

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