The Giants’ placekicker since 1993, Brad Daluiso has enjoyed a highlight-filled career in the NFL, but he’s also earning high marks off the field.

A sociology major at UCLA, Daluiso was one year short of his degree in 1991 when the NFL came calling. “This wasn’t the type of opportunity I could put on hold,” he recalls. So education goals were temporarily shelved in favor of field goals; but Daluiso is not the type of person to abandon something he starts.

When he learned about the degree-completion program at Fairleigh Dickinson, he seized the opportunity. He has already taken courses in criminology and American literature, and is now just five classes short of his baccalaureate. Daluiso, who resides in California with his wife and three children, takes courses during the season. Like the rest of the players enrolled, he usually studies on Tuesday, the one off-day during the season. “The classes have been great, the professors have been accommodating to our schedules, and Ken Vehrkens really deserves a lot of credit.”

Daluiso doesn’t plan on letting up. “This is something I need to finish. When you get that opportunity to complete a degree you have to do it. Whenever football is over, this will help.”

Fairleigh Dickinson senior Jana Fassel talks about her high school years with a definite NFL twist. “Freshman and sophomore year with the Broncos, junior year with the Raiders and my senior year with the Cardinals.” That translates to two years in Denver, Colo.; one in Los Angeles, Calif.; and a year in Phoenix, Ariz.; the cities where her dad, Jim, was working as an assistant coach in the NFL.

Fassel and her family followed her father as he worked his way through the college and pro ranks on the way to the head coaching position at the New York Giants. “We just got used to moving every year or two,” Fassel smiles. “I think I spent time in six or seven schools. Coaches get jobs in December after the football season is over so my dad would move first, and then my mom, three brothers and I would follow after we finished the school year.”

When her father landed the head coaching job with the Giants in 1997, Fassel was going to break the trend and not follow him to New Jersey. She chose to stay in Arizona, finish high school and start her college career. “I was recruited to play basketball at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff,” she says. “My brother, Brian, was a sophomore there, and it felt like the right thing to do, so I stayed.”

Fassel, however, missed her family more than she had imagined. When her brother transferred to Seton Hall University a year later, Fassel wasn’t far behind. “I just didn’t like the pressure of Division I athletics,” she says. “I had played basketball, soccer and volleyball growing up, but in a Division I program you concentrate on your sport exclusively.”

She first took a semester off to think about her future. “I knew I wanted to complete my education,” Fassel says, “and also stay active in athletics, but where was the big question.”

The Fassels had lived in Morristown, N.J., in the early 1990s, when her dad was an assistant coach with the Giants. Although Fassel had visited FDU’s Florham-Madison Campus, where the team had trained, she had not initially thought about attending Fairleigh Dickinson. “But just before the start of the 1999 academic year, my dad took me to visit FDU. I liked what I saw and enrolled just days later.”

Fassel is aiming toward a bachelor’s degree in marketing. She recently interned at SFX, a sports marketing firm in Rutherford, N.J., and hopes to pursue a career in sports marketing. She also is considering graduate studies in business.

In addition, Fassel plays both volleyball and basketball for the Division III Devils and has two years of athletic eligibility left. A forward on the basketball team, Fassel averaged nearly six points and six rebounds per game this season for the Devils. The team finished 15-11 and advanced to the second round of the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference tournament before losing to Rutgers-Camden.

Fassel says she is enjoying her FDU experience. She especially relishes the small college campus, family atmosphere, her ability to play both volleyball and basketball and being close to home. At her request, the University did not publicize her attendance, which gave her nearly a year before people started to equate Jana Fassel with the Fassel who roams the sidelines at Giants Stadium Sunday afternoons.

And Jana Fassel is there every Giants’ home contest, cheering on her dad’s team. She also was determined to be in Tampa, Fla., for this year’s Super Bowl, but not without first competing in her own big game against Middle Atlantic Conference rival King’s College. Originally scheduled to take a flight with the rest of the Giants’ family, she decided to catch a later commercial flight the evening before the Super Bowl. The Giants sent a car to FDU to pick her up after her game and take her to the airport. “I hoped our game wouldn’t go to overtime,” Fassel says, “and fortunately it didn’t.”

Unfortunately, both the Devils and the Giants fell short that weekend. But like her dad, Jana Fassel is determined to build on the past and make the 2001–02 academic and athletic seasons even more memorable.

As Super Bowl Sunday approached last January, Florham-Park police officer Mike Murphy, BA’99 (F-M), MAS’01 (F-M), was preparing nearly as intensely as the players. Murphy met with NFL officials, talked to Tampa, Fla., stadium security and read profiles and potential scenarios from league security to help prepare for possible “incidents.” His employer: the New York Giants; his role: to serve as “a mini-security force” for the Giants’ head coach and his family.

The 43-year-old Murphy was no rookie, however. He had been through the drill once before, in Tampa in 1991 with then-head coach Bill Parcells. He was prepared and, just as he had done for the last 10 years, he made sure the coach could do his job without distractions.

Murphy has relished this unsung role and part-time position, serving as the personal security officer for the Giants’ head coach and his family at league functions, regular-season and playoff games — and of course during two Super Bowl appearances.

His road to the Giants and to Fairleigh Dickinson was not a straight one. A Florham-Park native and hall-of-fame athlete at Hanover High School, Murphy started his college career at Iona College in 1977. After two years, he moved to Tempe, Ariz., but he says, “I never lost site of the fact that I wanted to complete my education, and I took courses in criminal justice at Mesa Community College.” When a position opened up at the Florham-Park Police Department in 1983, Murphy jumped at the opportunity to move back to his hometown.

A chance encounter at the Jersey shore led to Murphy’s tenure with the Giants. “I was on the Sea Girt (N.J.) boardwalk in 1991,” says Murphy, “when I met and struck up a conversation with Bill Parcells, who was the Giants’ head coach at the time. He asked me if I had played football and inquired about what I was doing. It was just a friendly conversation.”

As the conversation ended, Murphy recalls, “Parcells asked for my telephone number and said he might have some part-time work for me in the future.” Five months later, Murphy accompanied the team to San Francisco for the conference championship game with the 49ers. His assignment: watch over Parcells and, as Murphy describes, “keep the distractions down so the coach can concentrate on the game, anticipate the coach’s needs, and always keep an eye out for individuals who might cause a problem.”

After Parcells left the Giants, Murphy provided the same security services for his successors: Ray Handley, then Dan Reeves and now Jim Fassel. “It’s all done on ‘my time,’” Murphy says. “I use all my vacation and free time to work the Giants’ summer camp, home and away games, and hopefully playoff games and the Super Bowl.”