It ends in different ways, for different reasons, but it almost always ends, because you are hired to be fired — especially in the NFL, where winning isn’t everything but it’s the only thing, and there are no medals for trying.
It has undoubtedly become painfully obvious for Todd Bowles that he is Dead Coach Walking, and Jim Fassel knows exactly what that means around here, knows what Thanksgiving and Christmas are like for a head coach whose grip on his dream job will soon slip-slide away once and for all.
Fassel, Coach of the Year as a rookie in 1997, took the Giants to a Super Bowl in his fourth season, and toward the end of his seventh, with his 2003 Giants in the throes of an eight-game losing streak that would conclude a 4-12 season, he could read the writing on the wall.