New York Giants 2x Super Bowl Champion Carl Banks Interview | Promoting Starter | Joe Schoen

How y'all doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys. Sorry I was a little late. I was trying... I was stranded in Vegas for most of the night last night and got in later this afternoon and was just trying to get caught up on my day. So, I apologize for being a few minutes late.

No, I don't gamble. I was at a licensing trade show and you know, I was only there for 24 hours and thinking, hey, I'm going to just jump back on this Delta flight. And I guess all the weather across the East Coast had everything delayed. And you know, 9:30 flight turned into a 3:30 a.m. flight. So it was a little crazy.

Yeah.

No, I'm on a plane a lot, so I'm not terrified at all.

Well, I think they felt he did a good enough job or they feel that he has acquired the right amount of talent to move the team in the right direction. You know, the thing is with general managers, and it obviously doesn't matter what we think, they felt that he deserved it. So, I'm happy for Joe. I happen to like him. I think he's super smart. But the thing with general managers, none of them bat a thousand. It's the ones that stick out, right, that really make you question whether or not they are deserving of a job, right? You got the Saquon situation and a few other players that go and you know, as fans you look at those things but the sausage making if you will, you don't really dig into... you know, he inherited, and this is not... I'm just giving some information. This is not a defense of his contract or not. That was done and I didn't make that decision nor did anyone else. But you know, he inherited a really bad salary cap situation that he had to get the Giants in fiscal shape that you know, had to happen before they could even think about talent, right? And then you know, the free agents that they were getting during that period were you know, like sale free agents, just somebody that could duct tape and you know, some stuff and see if they could get through with it, get by with it. And it just did not look good. The optics weren't great for fans who are dying for something better. And I think over the last three years, if you had to judge where this team is roster-wise, you can feel pretty decent about it. Coach didn't work out. Brian Daboll didn't work out. And that's on his record as well. Now, did Brian Daboll have something to do with that? Sure. I think if Brian Daboll would have fired his defensive coordinator, he'd probably still be the coach here. But as it turns out, they got, you know, a winning coach here, a championship coach now, and a roster that they're adding to and the draft choices they've hit on. So, I think they are in decent shape. Again, you know, you can point to a guy like Evan Neal and say, 'Well, he hasn't stood out.' Yeah, it happens. What did you replace him with is what normally fans want to look at, right? Evan's on the bench. He didn't play a game last year and the offensive line was top 10. So, are we still complaining about him? You understand what I'm saying? You want him to be a player, but it's not an exact science picking players. You can go to every single team, including the Philadelphia Eagles. They just, you know, they cover their misses with really big hits. And, you know, this is where the Giants are trying to be like, let some of these big hits happen. And we won't worry about the guys that we had to let go or the guys that we didn't extend to a fifth-year contract. It doesn't matter. Grades don't matter when your team is winning, right? But when your team is losing, everything gets magnified.

Dexter didn't want to be a Giant anymore. And you know, for me, Dexter is still one of my favorite... he's a great person, number one, but still one of my favorite Giants all time. He didn't have a great year, but the Giants moved on. He moved on. I actually just did a pod earlier with Solomon Wilcox about... because he runs the Believe Bengals podcast and you know, we were able to catch up. But it's one of these deals where you know, they wanted him to be a part of what they were doing. Dexter was probably fatigued with the situation of always losing and you know, so he got a fresh start and you know, you didn't let a guy go that didn't want to go. You know, they got a 10th pick from it and they got, you know, a very bright...

Absolutely. And so you know, you can't complain about that. Look, Dexter is not a dog in me in the bad sense. He's had more good years than he's had bad years. He's been great some years, you know, all-pro, right? And he's disruptive. And so hopefully his situation in Cincinnati with B.J. Hill, they do some good things, but he's a Bengal now. I don't really, you know, care that much about it to watch and see if he fails or succeeds.

But I wish him the best. And you focus on the guys they got, you know, they got some good guys. They got free agents. They got, you know, a guy that I'm looking forward to seeing. He's got some developing to do, but as a rotational player, Bobby Jameson Travis is a guy when I looked at his film, I renamed him instead of BJT, it's BTJ, Bobby Traffic Jam. He caused a lot of pileups at Auburn. So, and I told him at the Giants Town Hall, I'm like, 'Your new name is BTJ, Bobby Traffic Jam.' And he started laughing. I'm like, 'Don't make me eat those words.'

Apparently it was. But, you know, for Mark and I, it was child abuse. But you know, look, they'd start a drill and they put me and Mark in there and we end up running the whole drill the whole period. Like it's like, okay, you know, put two guys in there and then, all right, Bavaro and Banks, you know, and it's just, you know, Mark and I would never pre-script anything and, you know, we just wanted to make each other better. And then after the drill was over with, we'd have a conversation about what he could have done better or what I could have done better. Um, but yeah, like it literally, we would be two reps into a one-on-one drill or nine-on-seven drill and Parcells would be like, 'Okay, Banks!' And then, you know, they both, the tight end coach Mike Pope and Al Groh, my linebacker coach, and Belichick, they're there coaching it and they're like, 'Run it again. Run it again.' And it was stuff of legend for the people who were watching because the practice, you know, just stopped and they just watched us go. Mark and I talk about it all the time. But it, you know, it made us all better, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, when we are broadcasting, there's these two people that sit right next to each other for years and they had a Banks-Bavaro jersey on. I used to always take a picture of it every week and send it to Mark via text message.

Yeah, let me just say better. Let me phrase it differently. It made us the best at our positions. You know, we were the best in the league at our positions. We made each other that.

Um, just wanting to be great. That's all. Wanting to be absolutely dominant, you know. Um, and if you can take anything from being a teammate of Lawrence Taylor, you want to be dominant. You want to dominate, right? And if he could do it, I could do it, Leonard could do it, then it just becomes contagious. And, you know, not just being dominant, but being the best at it. And that was my thing, right? Um, I might be the other guy, but I'm gonna... you're gonna have a problem, you know, with me and I'm gonna be, you know, impossible to block. Um, and that's how it ended up.

I don't think people realize in today's game, but I mean...

Yeah, I think that was something, George, that we took great pride in as a defense in just making players quit. Like we would come off by the end of the first quarter, we would literally take a poll on whose player is ready, whose opponent... they're not going to be able to do anything with this guy because he's going to be done. Um, that was, you know, the level of toughness, I don't want to say ruthlessness, but it is an element of ruthlessness that we want to beat you so bad that you don't want to block us or we know you quit because you're telegraphing every play. Every time you've got to block me, I know because you're nervous or, you know, so that's when we know. And then at some point during the course of the game, they're just like, you know, they let go of the rope.

Look at this. Yeah, that's not Tommy DeVito, folks. That's Jeff Hostetler. Look at that. So, spike on the way down. Story behind that particular play. Um, I don't know if that clip showed you the guy who's rushing off the edge. So this guy Andre Waters, they used to call him Muddy Waters or Dirty Waters. Um, he was always the guy that would come off hard, cut somebody. He was a little play to the edge. I don't want to call him dirty, but he always went hard. And at that time there were no rules that said you can't cut a guy on either side of the football. But you know, he was that guy. And so I had this idea once we put the fake in. Um, Bill was like, 'Are you going... will we be able to run this?' And I said, 'Yeah.' So I line up and I just line up and I start talking trash to Waters. I'm like, 'I'm gonna cut your leg. So you run here. I'm gonna cut you.' And he's talking trash. So, I knew he was going to go full out, right? And so, I just wanted to ensure that he was just gonna sell out and sure enough, he did. He trash talked me and he ran in there like he was going to block the punt and I just released and Jeff threw me the football. So it was set up perfectly because, you know, he was always the guy that was always in there just torpedoing everything and that's what we needed him to do on that particular play. So I ensured it by talking trash to him and, you know, telling him I'm gonna cut him so that I knew he was going to come down low and just dive through and sure enough he did it and we were... he took the bait.

Probably Elvis Patterson.

Pepper. Or Pepper. Pepper. Talked trash.

Pepper is like our universal answer. Everyone says Pepper.

It was pretty easy. It was a standard. Like we wanted to be great. It wasn't a matter of, 'Oh, we got one, we're good.' No, we're like, 'Let's go and continue.' It was the standard. It was the expectation. Um, because after the loss to the Bears in '85, we knew that there was another level to go. And once we hit that, we weren't going to stop. You know, we wanted to continue to dominate. And, you know, we had, I think, a good seven-year run of just making the playoffs and being in the thick of it every year. So, um, that was our mantra. We weren't, you know, we weren't one-hit wonders. We were going to be good for a long time. And we held everybody, every new player that came in, whether he was drafted or a free agent, we held everybody to the same standard. They knew when they walked through the door, this is how Giants football is played.

No, that was walking into the game we knew exactly how we wanted to play them. Um, the genius of Bill Belichick, um, you know, in the NFL and it probably still holds true to this day. Um, there's a thing called tendencies and there's a thing called trends. They use analytics for it now, but if you do something over a three-game period or a four-game period, it goes from a tendency to a trend. And what we noticed over a six-game period, the Buffalo Bills only ran the ball on draw. Everything else was a swing pass to Thurman Thomas and that was their running play. You know, they'd throw it to him in the flat and he'd run and, you know, get five, six, seven yards every time. So, um, that was kind of their spread offense at the time where the ball was out in a hurry. So trying to get a sack or putting big people in the game to try to impact how their offense was is a fruitless exercise because we looked at the Raiders game and I think they scored almost 50 points on the Raiders and with the Raiders, before they could get to the top of their pass drop, the ball was out and the receivers were off and running. So what Belichick did, once he knew that the run game was not a threat and we just had to guard against a draw play, is how would we stop the pass? And he says, 'Okay, we're going to line up in our drops. We're not going to drop. We're going to line up seven, eight yards deep where we would normally be. So when the ball is snapped and the ball comes out of the quarterback's hand, we're waiting on those crossing routes.' You know, it's not a matter of them catching the ball behind us. They're going to catch it in front of us and we were going to pound them. And that's what we did. So, we beat the hell out of Andre Reed. Um, you know, Thurman, you know, listen, if Marv Levy would have smartened up a little bit more, they probably win the game because Thurman, I think, ended up with 100 yards and, you know, Bill said that we were going to let him get 100 yards because if he gets 100 yards, they're not passing. Um, but you know, they didn't start running the ball until it was too late. They still were dead set on figuring out how to pass the ball on us, but we were pounding them so much, their wide receivers. It just, you know, Andre didn't want to catch the ball over the middle anymore, you know. Um, so every one of their receivers, we were in position when the ball was out, we could see them, we could drive on them and hit them. And, you know, the Buffalo Bills were just such a good team. Their defense was really good, too. Obviously, um, you got a field goal missed. And listen, if they make that field goal, we tip our hat to them because they played a hell of a game. Um, but I also give Sean Landetta a lot of credit for the punt that started them way back. Um, and we played enough defense and we knew what the kicker's range was and it panned out for us. But, you know, if Sean doesn't hit a good punt, it probably ends up a different game because, you know, you take the same amount of yardage and you add another 10 to it. You know, if they get another 10 yards on a punt return or, you know, the ball comes up shorter on their starting position, field position, they probably have enough to win the game. So, I mean, it was a three-phase game for us, offense, defense, and special teams.

I was on the field. I was on the field. Um, we kind of, again, we, you know, we prepared for everything. So, we knew at third down, you could probably ask some of the guys that were on the sideline, but the discussion was made. What's his range? What's his range? Where do we have to get the stop? Um, and they call a defense based on where we need to get the stop. And, you know, you hear Sean talk about it a lot, Landetta, you know, because he was kind of the guy who gave the information in terms of special teams. And, you know, Sean said his range is X. He's not going to make this. And sure enough, he missed it.

Listen, um, I'll tell anybody when Vince McMahon was running WWF, it was the most incredible experience fan and participant wise. He really knew how to create a great show. Um, you know, and even, you know, when we had the pre-match meetings, he told us what the rules were, what the expectations were. Um, and at that time he's like, 'Look, WWF is a family-oriented, we don't do blood, so you football players don't go for blood,' you know. Um, and it was just an incredible experience.

No. Chris Berman, Reggie White...

Well, it was a lot of fun. They trained a lot for it, though.

Um, I would say without a doubt Super Bowl 21 and then Super Bowl 25, um, as a player and then obviously being inducted into the Ring of Honor, um, was a really, really big moment for me.

Um, I started in the sports licensing business in 1987. Uh, I got my first license from the NFL to do big and tall leather jackets. Um, what got me in the space of Starter? Starter had just entered the NFL in '86, I believe, and I was one of the first players that they signed. And it was such a transformative time in sports apparel and how sports was presented. And David Beckerman, um, the founder of Starter, had a vision for how he wanted coaches to look, how he wanted players to look, and how they were represented. And as a result of that, fandom became fashionable. You know, fans wanted to actually wear some of the stuff that they were seeing on the sidelines. And, you know, obviously the two Starter jackets, the satin jacket and the pullover breakaway, were iconic to this day. And, you know, there's so many people I say they have Starter stories. Everybody has a Starter story. You know...

Yeah. My favorite jacket was the Hartford Whalers. To this day, it's still my favorite.

There's the Parcells parka. That's the parka that Bill wore all season. The red Belichick jacket. I'm gonna give you guys before I jump off. I'm going to give you the reason that that jacket is so important to our success. So when, you know, most all the teams wore, the coaches wore a one-color jacket, right? And so Bill being the strategic thinker that he is, he's like, 'We have to have some type of signal during like two-minute drills or when the game gets hectic, and I need to figure out how to get our signals in.' So he ended up wearing this red jacket, and people didn't realize it, but like in the heat of a moment, if we wanted to know what the call was, we could see the guy in the red jacket. It was him most of the time, but every once in a while it would be somebody else. So, you know, you would have these coaches in blue jackets giving all these signals, but we were focused in on the guy in the red jacket. He was the guy that was giving us our signals. And so, um, hence, that's called the Belichick red jacket.

There you go. Is that an original?

That's the OG locker room tee right there. I have that in... I have that in plastic. That piece right there that you just showed is available on Giant Shop or shopgiants.com. Um, you guys can get it now. That's a piece of history. That's... Hold that up again so people can see. It's the exact... That's the locker room t-shirt right there. Yeah, that we got after we won the thing. Yep. It's available now.

That's awesome.

Thank you guys for having me.

We'll see. We'll see what happens.

Completely agree. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.