NY Giants: Iconic general manager George Young elected to Pro Football Hall of Fame

The New York Giants were in disarray, and infamy was seeping through the walls of a once-proud organization when a young scouting director from the Miami Dolphins was tasked with the daunting challenge of saving a franchise.

George Young was hired as general manager just three months after Joe Pisarcik's fumble helped give the Philadelphia Eagles a victory that will be forever branded the Miracle of the Meadowlands, rock bottom for the Giants during an embarrassing era of mediocrity that ended with a 6-10 record in 1978.

What Young wound up building over the next two decades was certainly miraculous in and of itself.

"He took our organization from being in last place and not having a lot of respect around the league, to being a Super Bowl champion," Giants co-owner and team president John Mara said Wednesday after Young finally received the much-deserved call to Canton.

A longtime NFL executive for the Dolphins and Giants, Young was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of the league’s 15-member Centennial Class of 2020 to celebrate the NFL’s 100th anniversary.

"He made every football department in our organization more professional. He changed the reputation and level of respect that our team had for the better," Mara added. "He improved us in so many different ways."

Young, the Giants' general manager from 1979-97, was one of the most influential figures in the team’s history. He left behind a legacy of having led the Giants from the dark ages of the late 1960s and 1970s to remarkable success, including their first two Super Bowl victories. He also won five NFL Executive of the Year awards and worked for the NFL office following his retirement from the Giants in 1997 until 2001 when he died of a neurological disease at age 71.

"I don't have a complaint in life," Young said in a 1997 interview with The Record. "I've been very fortunate, things always have worked out for me. Sometimes they took awhile, but they always seemed to work out."

The Giants had just two winning seasons and did not make the playoffs in the 15 years that followed the 1963 NFL Championship Game, in which they participated.

Then the director of player personnel for the Miami Dolphins, Young was hired in February 1979 after NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle offered him as a compromise candidate to the Giants' owners, Wellington Mara and his nephew, Tim, whose relationship had been marred by in-fighting over the direction of the franchise.

"George is certainly very deserving of being in the Hall of Fame," John Mara said in a team statement. "My only regret is that he's not around to enjoy this. ... He certainly is a very deserving Hall of Famer. Again, I only wish he could be around to enjoy this moment. It's long overdue. All of us here are very happy that at long last, he will be enshrined in Canton, Ohio."

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Young was criticized for his first draft pick: a quarterback from Morehead State named Phil Simms. Two years later, Young picked linebacker Lawrence Taylor with the second overall selection in the NFL Draft.

Two years later, Young had to make a coaching hire following the 1982 season when Ray Perkins left the Giants for Alabama, so he promoted Perkins' defensive coordinator, Bill Parcells, to the position.

The rest is franchise history, and there's no disputing the enormous role Young played in its success.

"We both came into the league with Johnny Unitas as the quarterback," former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said of Young, who he met in 1970 when they worked together for the Baltimore Colts. "We both realized the importance and the impact of a great quarterback. I knew that quarterback was going to be a high priority and I also knew big people were a high priority. He was going to have two lines that were powerful, and he was going to have a quarterback. That's exactly how he started to build the Giants. He believed in big people. That was the way George was."

A special Blue-Ribbon Panel comprised of members of the overall Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee, Hall of Famers, coaches, football executives and several leading historians scrutinized the merits of nearly 300 candidates nominated for consideration as part of the Hall's special Centennial Class of 2020.

The class was chosen as part of the NFL's 100th anniversary.

The 15-member "Centennial Slate" includes 10 Seniors, three Contributors and two Coaches (Bill Cowher and Jimmy Johnson) will be elected to the Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2020.

"George is the man responsible for returning stability and credibility to the organization," Parcells told The Record shortly following Young's death in 2001.

Teaching was Young's desired profession, but football was his obsession.

After graduating from Bucknell, he earned master's degrees from Johns Hopkins and Loyola, and a doctorate in humane letters from Western Maryland College.

Young taught history and political science at Calvert Hall and later City College High in Baltimore. He was a decorated tackle at Bucknell, appearing in the Blue-Gray all-star game at the end of his senior year in 1951. He had a tryout with the Dallas Texans in 1952, and returned to Baltimore to teach and coach.

Legend has it that Young would hang out around the Baltimore Colts' practices, asking questions and gaining knowledge while getting the attention of eventual Hall of Fame coach Don Shula.

Shula asked Young to put together some reports for the team while Shula and his staff were coaching the Senior Bowl, and he did such a thorough job, Shula hired him as an assistant in the personnel department.

Two years later, Shula made Young his offensive line coach, and then his director of player personnel. Accorsi, who succeeded Young as the Giants' general manager, worked in the Colts' public relations department while Young was there.

Young took over the Giants on Feb. 12, 1979, at a time when fans protested the Giants because of how far they had fallen from the championship teams of two decades earlier.

With Simms and Taylor leading the way, the Giants made the playoffs in the third year of Young's term, and won the first of two Super Bowl titles in his tenure five years later.

Young left the Giants to work in the league office in 1998 and handled various duties with the league until he fell ill and took a leave of absence early in the 2001 season prior to his death that December.

“I’ve had a wonderful job here," Young once said of his tenure with the Giants. "We’ve had our ups and downs, but I’ve never had a bad day."

Wednesday was a good day for Young and the Giants, and long overdue at that.

Art Stapleton is the Giants beat writer for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to all Giants analysis, news, trades and more, please subscribe today and sign up for our NFC East newsletter.

Email: stapleton@northjersey.com Twitter: @art_stapleton