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His players wanted him back. So did Giants fans, to whom he had now brought two world championships after more than two decades of mediocrity. On the Tuesday night following the Super Bowl triumph, hundreds of New Yorkers crammed into Gallagher’s Steak House on West Fifty-Second Street to see Parcells appear on his weekly radio show for WNEW-AM.

The crowd repeatedly interrupted him with applause. As the New York Times reported, “The fans made clear they were not there simply to celebrate the 20-19 victory over the Buffalo Bills Sunday night but to urge their adored maximum leader to stay at his post next season.”

Despite all the turmoil and suggestive evidence, the notion that the New Jersey native would leave his self-described “dream job” seemed ludicrous.

“He’ll be coaching the Giants next year, I guarantee that,” his mentor Mickey Corcoran said the day after Super Bowl XXV. “He’ll never coach anywhere else. He’s a Giant. He’s got the greatest job in football.”

Aside from the health issues, reassembling his coaching staff, bristly interactions with his general manager, and potential burnout, another factor rubbed some of the luster off “the greatest job in football.” The Giants’ roster was ready for major reconstruction.

The multiple surgeries endured by Mark Bavaro in recent years (two on his left knee, along with wrist, toe, and shoulder operations) took a toll on the veteran Giant. During their playoff run, one Giant quietly told Newsday that retirement “would be the best thing for Bavaro. It’s pretty bad. I don’t know how he keeps doing it.” Super Bowl XXV was his final game in a New York Giants uniform.

At another key position, the Giants also faced major concern regarding one of their proven veterans. Bart Oates—the only New York lineman to start both Super Bowl victories—had already graduated from Seton Hall Law School and passed the New Jersey state bar. During Super Bowl week, he acknowledged that after the season, he would consider retirement. The thirty-two-year-old had recently accepted a summer position at the Morristown firm Ribis, Graham and Curtin.

On the other side of the ball, four of the defensive starters (Lawrence Taylor, Everson Walls, Perry Williams, and Leonard Marshall) from Super Bowl XXV would be thirty or older by the middle of the 1991 season. And L. T.’s arrest—while in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl, during a traffic altercation with a taxi driver, he allegedly struck the cab with a metal pipe—again frustrated the Giants’ front office.

The identity of next year’s kicker was even in question. Thirty-four-year-old Matt Bahr had kicked eight tremendously important field goals during the postseason, including three clutch fourth-quarter kicks in the NFC Championship Game and Super Bowl. But in training camp, previously incumbent kicker Raul Allegre would be back to reclaim his job.

“I think [Parcells] saw what was going on with the franchise,” said Hank Gola, a New York Post sportswriter during the Parcells’ era. “He always used to say, ‘God takes it away from you, with players.’ And I think he saw that God was going to take it from a lot of players . . . that was kind of the last hurrah.”

Even Ottis Anderson could not sidestep widespread consensus that the Super Bowl had been his swan song. Within seconds of being named the game’s Most Valuable Player, ABC’s Brent Musburger asked the thirty-four-year-old about retirement: “No way, I’m coming back again. I still got work to do.”

“It’s the player that determines when he’s going to retire,” Bart Oates insisted at the post–Super Bowl press conference. “What he has left, and how he’s going to perform. [Ottis is] a tremendous role model for anyone out there that has somebody telling them they can’t get the job done, that they’re washed up. He was supposed to be washed up when he first came here, before the first Super Bowl. Another five or six years, and I think he’ll be ready to retire.”

Anderson may have refused to walk away, but that did not mean his place with the 1991 New York Giants was guaranteed. Five days after the win in Tampa, the