Ray Handley, an obscure assistant football coach who was unexpectedly thrust into one of American sports’ brightest spotlights when he was named head coach of the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants in 1991, died on Thursday. He was 81.
His death was announced in a post on LinkedIn by a nephew, Robert Handley, who did not state the cause or place of death.
Handley’s tenure as the Giants’ coach was short and stormy. After clashing with reporters and some of his players, and repeatedly being booed off the field by the home fans, Handley was fired after two seasons in which the team slipped to a record of 8-8 and then 6-10. Although he had been an assistant on football staffs for the previous 25 years, Handley never again coached football at any level, at least not publicly — a curious outcome for someone who was once respected for an erudite mastery of the sport’s intricacies.
Afterward, Handley, a scholarly, bespectacled graduate of Stanford, retreated from the public eye.
But his time leading the Giants may have been ill-fated from the start, when he was put in the untenable position of replacing Bill Parcells, a popular New York-area figure who had coached the Giants to their first two Super Bowl victories.
Parcells resigned for health reasons just two months before the 1991 Giants were to open their summer training camp, which left little time for Handley to mold the team to his liking — or for the players to adapt to his leadership.
Moreover, Handley, a Giants offensive coach for seven seasons, was also without a key Parcells ally, the defensive coordinator Bill Belichick, who had left the Giants early in 1991 to become head coach of the Cleveland Browns after shaping the Giants’ defense into the league’s best the previous season.
As George Young, the Giants general manager who hired Handley, said on the day he dismissed him, Dec. 30, 1992: “Ray had a tough situation. He never flinched. He was a good soldier.”
Describing the Giants as a team in transition, Young added, “I think it would’ve been difficult for most anybody.”
Robert Ray Handley was born on Oct. 8, 1944, in Artesia, N.M., a small city in the southeast corner of the state. His father, Robert Douglas Handley, was a rancher, and his mother, Ruby (Kennedy) Handley, was a schoolteacher.
After the family moved to Reno, Handley was an all-state high school football player there. He then played three seasons at running back for Stanford and became a graduate assistant coach for the university in 1967.
For the next 15 years, Handley lived the typically itinerant life of a coach. He spent two seasons as an assistant at the United States Military Academy at West Point, along with Parcells; eight years as an assistant in a return to Stanford; and four years as head coach at a Nevada high school.
He rejoined Parcells in 1978 at the Air Force Academy when Parcells was appointed the team’s head coach. When Parcells was named Giants head coach in 1983, he recruited Handley to be his running-backs coach.
Handley stayed in that post for six years, with the Giants winning the Super Bowl after the 1986 and 1990 N.F.L. seasons. But days after the Giants’ second victory, a 20-19 thriller against the Buffalo Bills, Handley, whose mien in an often raucous football locker room tended to be quiet and cerebral, told Parcells that he was going to leave football and enroll at the George Washington University law school.
Parcells persuaded him to change his mind, enticing him with a promotion to offensive coordinator. Parcells had valued his aide-de-camp, stationing Handley directly behind him on the sidelines during games to help with various math-driven decisions like late-game clock management.
Two months later, Parcells resigned. Handley, then 46, was startled but appreciative of the opportunity he was handed.
“Things were getting a little too routine in my career,” he told The Daily News. “I needed something in my life.”
The Handley era began inauspiciously. His first major decision was controversial: benching the team’s popular, longtime quarterback Phil Simms for Simms’s backup, Jeff Hostetler.
The previous year, as the Giants marched to their second Super Bowl, Simms was having one of his best seasons before it was cut short by a broken foot. Hostetler replaced him and helped lead the Giants to their victory over Buffalo.
Several locker room leaders, most prominently the future Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, sided with aggrieved fans and felt that Simms, who had been with the Giants since 1979, was being disrespected. It was the beginning of two seasons of the players grumbling about Handley’s decision-making.
Handley won his head-coaching debut in a nationally televised “Monday Night Football” game against the estimable San Francisco 49ers. His Giants then lost seven of their next 13 games and were eliminated from playoff contention.
From midseason on, many players began questioning Handley’s tactics and leadership in off-the-record comments that made headlines in the newspapers. During a routine weekday news conference, Handley, whose relationship with reporters had already turned adversarial, became incensed by a question about the Simms-Hostetler rumpus, calling the query “ridiculous.”
Asked why the question was ridiculous, Handley grew indignant. “Because I said it was a ridiculous question,” he answered, voice raised. He then threatened to end the news conference if there was another question about the quarterbacks. Asked again about Simms and Hostetler, Handley sprung to his feet and bolted toward the exit, barking, “I warned you.”
The incident drew national coverage, embarrassing the Giants ownership.
During the team’s final home game that season, which ended in another defeat, one spectator in Giants Stadium’s lower deck held up a sign that read, “From the Super Bowl to the Toilet Bowl.” As Handley jogged toward the locker room, he was enveloped by a resounding chorus from the grandstand: “Ray must go!”
Handley survived to coach another year. But a late-season, five-game losing streak dropped the Giants to second-to-last place in their division. When Handley, whose two-year record then stood at 14-18, was fired, few were surprised.
“Some guys are meant to be head coaches,” the Giants linebacker Pepper Johnson said. “I don’t know if Ray was.”
For decades after his dismissal, Handley made no overt attempt to stay in touch with anyone associated with the Giants, a team official said in 2025. Handley did arrange a private meeting the night before a game in Denver in the late 1990s with Jim Fassel, who was then the Giants head coach. (Fassel had been Handley’s offensive coordinator in 1991-92.) The visit was an aberration, the only known gesture by Handley to stay in touch with his pro football past.
Complete information on his survivors was not available.
Young, the Giants executive who put Handley at the helm of a celebrated team in the country’s largest media market, would later call that decision his biggest regret in a career that ended with his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“I still have a lot of respect for Ray,” Young said at the 1992 news conference announcing Handley’s firing. “Coaches understand that when you don’t win, there’s a problem and your job is in jeopardy. I thought Ray handled it as well as any man could handle it.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post Ray Handley, Ill-Fated Giants Coach, Is Dead at 81 appeared first on New York Times.
