That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory

by John Eisenberg

In January 1959 Lombardi had gone to the league meetings in Philadelphia as part of the Giant delegation and interviewed face-to-face with the Packers for the first time. Now, a year later, in January 1960, he went to the league meetings with the Packer delegation and found himself talking to the Giants about a job. Frustrated by back-to-back losses in the championship game, Jim Lee Howell had told Giants owner Wellington Mara he was ready to step down. Had Howell arrived at that conclusion a year earlier, Mara could have chosen between the two attractive head-coaching candidates on Howell’s staff, Lombardi and Tom Landry. But now Lombardi was in Green Bay, and Landry had recently announced he would be returning to his home state, Texas, to coach the new NFL expansion team in Dallas, leaving Mara without an obvious successor to Howell.