In 2023, when this Joe Schoen-Brian Daboll Giants regime showed its true colors, Daboll’s worst quality was his fingerpointing.
He blamed offensive coordinator Mike Kafka for the team’s weekly problems scoring points. He complained about Wink Martindale’s defense, which tied for the NFL lead in takeaways, despite Daboll’s 30th-ranked offense floundering.
Daboll didn’t lead. He deflected. It’s why so many coaches ran for the hills.
And that’s what his Sunday postgame press conference complaints sounded like. They sounded like Daboll again pinning the Giants’ constant losing on someone else.
This time, quarterback Drew Lock was the one who caught the strays.
Lock posted a jaw-dropping 309 passing yards, five touchdowns and a 155.3 QB rating. But Daboll treated it more as proof of the absence of good quarterback play on the Giants than as a basis for genuine praise.
“Drew played… This was his fourth game he started. Obviously, he had three starts that weren’t great,” Daboll said. “But did a good job during the week of being focused … He played well today.”
Daboll reiterated “you need good quarterback play,” as if he weren’t the one hired to generate it.
He said it was “pretty impressive” that rookies Malik Nabers and Tyrone Tracy Jr. each reached 1,000 yards as rookies “in a season like this with a variety of quarterbacks.”
Sorry, wasn’t Daboll here in the 2023 offseason when the Giants re-signed Daniel Jones to a four-year, $160 million contract extension, while a reclamation project named Baker Mayfield signed a small, one-year deal with the Buccaneers?
Wasn’t Daboll the coach of the Giants in the 2023 offseason when teams were eligible to negotiate with the Ravens’ Lamar Jackson on the non-exclusive franchise tag?
Wasn’t Daboll running the team during the 2023 season when the Giants kept Tommy DeVito in as the starting quarterback ahead of a cleared Tyrod Taylor, which led to Taylor signing with the Jets in the offseason?
Wasn’t Daboll bullish about taking Nabers in the Giants’ 2024 draft room last spring while passing on Bo Nix, Michael Penix Jr. and J.J. McCarthy?
Wasn’t Daboll part of the decision to leapfrog Lock for DeVito after cutting Jones this season, only to admit it was the wrong call and go back to Lock?
You can give Daboll this: Schoen has led or been party to all of these mistakes, too. So it’s not just the coach. The Giants’ GM runs the show.
And maybe Daboll is alluding to facts not yet confirmed about the Giants’ mismanagement of that position.
Maybe Daboll badly wanted Russell Wilson, for example, but was overruled by Schoen and ownership when the now-Steelers quarterback sought a guarantee that he would play. Maybe Lock wasn’t Daboll’s preference. Those details aren’t known.
Daboll, in fairness, was the one who adeptly operated a run-based offense led by Jones and Saquon Barkley in 2022 to complement Martindale’s impressive defense for a playoff berth and a Coach of the Year award.
Entering that first season, Schoen and Daboll inherited their Giants’ jobs initially planning to turn over the quarterback position. They did not anticipate having the kind of success that would lead them to reinvest in Jones.
Here’s the thing, though: They did. They both did. They committed themselves to Jones.
Schoen said himself in November that the Giants changed course after 2022 and believed they were closer to contending than they actually were. They misevaluated the quarterback, the team and themselves.
“You come off a winning season, some of the issues were maybe masked or you’re blinded a little bit by it because of the success,” Schoen said at the bye week. “Then once we extended Daniel, you try to accelerate it because the way that contract was structured.”
And Daboll wants to complain about the quarterbacks in his room now?
If he’s trying to say that his offense would be productive if he had someone like Josh Allen, well that’s no stretch. That’s the only top-ranked offense Daboll has ever run. That would also be true for every other coach in the league.
How’s this for a rhetorical question: If Sam Darnold had signed with the Giants this past offseason instead of the Vikings, who believes Darnold would have resurrected his career with Daboll’s Giants in New York the way he has done with Kevin O’Connell in Minnesota?
Everyone knows the answer to that. Even with Nabers on the team, he wouldn’t have.
So no one wants to hear it. It sounds petty and ridiculous.
Just like Daboll’s decision on Sunday to “give Shea Tierney a ton of credit” for Lock’s improvement while not mentioning Kafka at all.
Think about it: the Giants’ quarterback had a career game. Daboll praised the quarterbacks coach, a friend he brought from Buffalo, but not his offensive coordinator and assistant head coach and former NFL quarterback for the job well done.
This one year after Daboll and the Giants gave Tierney and Kafka promotions and shinier new titles off an historically bad offensive season to try to improve the optics around the crumbling staff.
This is what happens, though, when pressure builds on people and jobs are on the line: they show you who they really are.
