Brian Daboll didn’t fire his defensive coordinator, Shane Bowen, on Monday, despite as monumental a fourth-quarter collapse in Denver as any Giants team has ever seen or known. Oh, sure. Once we had the Miracle at the Meadowlands, Herm Edwards scooping and scoring when the Giants couldn’t run out the clock. Now we’ve seen the Miracle at Mile High nearly a half-century later.
So Daboll is still here. Bowen is still here. It wasn’t just an act of compassion on Daboll’s part on Monday. It was at least partly self-preservation. He’s already run off one defensive coordinator, Wink Martindale. If he had fired Bowen after the Broncos rang up his defense for 33 fourth-quarter points, another layer of body armor — perhaps the last one — would have been removed from the head coach. And he would have been what the Giants were down the stretch on Sunday:
Defenseless.
The Giants either recover from this across the last 10 games of this season, or they don’t. They either win some games or it won’t just be Daboll and Bowen getting fired. It will be all of them. Maybe the general manager, Joe Schoen, will survive, but if the Giants don’t win some games, if 2-5 turns into 2-11 with the schedule at which the Giants are looking — at Eagles, 49ers, at Bears, Packers, at Lions, at Patriots — then you tell me why Schoen gets a reprieve.
Shoen, by the way, is the general manager who has let the following players walk out the door lately: Daniel Jones, Saquon Barkley, Xavier McKinney, Leonard Williams, Julian Love, Darren Waller, Sterling Sheppard. Some of this was cap-related, but not all. McKinney is with the Packers now. Teams don’t even throw the ball his way. Think he could have helped out in the fourth quarter Sunday?
Put it another way: It’s going to take more than the presence of the kid, Jaxson Dart, to save everybody.
Bowen did everything except take a knee on that final Broncos drive. That was after the Giants once again — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — didn’t have a placekicker worth a rip. The placekicker is still on the team, too.
When it finally was over on Sunday, it wasn’t Dart who spoke for Giants fans and it certainly wasn’t the coach. It was Brian Burns. Burns, even on a bum ankle, had played his heart out in Denver, and then screamed his head off on the way to the locker room about Bowen’s boneheaded decision to only rush Broncos quarterback Bo Nix with three defenders, giving Nix enough time to make himself a sandwich with his first big play down the field.
“Stupid ass s–t,” Burns said.
We sort of knew that already. And Daboll could frankly have saved his breath when he stepped to the podium once the game was mercifully over for his team and said that it wasn’t just one person who lost this one, and gloriously, for the Giants, “It’s a collective.” We know, Coach, we watched the game, too.
Daboll is right about something, though, even though he wasn’t right about very much in Denver after it was 26-8: It wasn’t just Bowen. As fiery and game as Dart was, and as much as he kept flinging it around after the Giants had finally coughed up the lead, he didn’t get much help from the other coordinator, Mike Kafka, either.
Understand something: Quarterbacks don’t hear just play calls sent into their helmets now. They can get more directions about the next play than actors get from Broadway director when they’re blocking out a scene. I know Dart is a rookie and rookies make rookie mistakes, it’s part of the deal. But he had to be told, and in no uncertain terms, that if there was even a hint of doubt before he threw that crushing interception, he had to eat the ball and go down. He really should have been running around end — the way Nix did for two big scores — on third-and-five instead of putting the ball in the air.
In so many ways, it was every bit as boneheaded a call, considering the clock and circumstances, as anything Bowen did later. Yeah, it was a collective. Of coaching negligence.
Did the Giants pile up that big lead? They did, and actually looked like a potential playoff team in the process. But they couldn’t close this one the way they couldn’t close against the Cowboys in the fourth quarter and overtime. So they lost to 40-37 to the Cowboys. They lose 33-32 to the Broncos. Do they have a defense again? But you tell me exactly how much knowing the way those two games ended.
They can rush the quarterback. They have a quarterback. Now they have to win some of these next six games, and give themselves a chance to still look like a real team when they get to the last four teams on the schedule:
Commanders
Vikings
Raiders
Cowboys
It is the coach’s job to figure it out now, so that 2-5 really doesn’t become 2-11. Or 3-10. Because you know what records like that would feel like? Like pretty much everything that has been happening over the past several years.
Everybody knows how different the season would look — how different the season would feel — if the Giants had been able to close the deal in Denver. They didn’t. You know why this one was worse, and much worse, than the Miracle at the Meadowlands? Because that team in ’78 was nothing. This team really had given Giants fans hope, for the first time in a long time.
Then came 33 points for the Broncos in the fourth quarter after being shut out for the first three. Then came a team blowing an 18-point lead with under six minutes to play for the first time in NFL history. Nobody gets fired because of all that. Yet.
