Giants ownership’s tolerance of Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll running this team should have reached a breaking point on Sunday.
Schoen’s roster in year four still looks like the early stages of a group project that makes the teacher walk over and ask, “What is that supposed to be?”
Daboll commits weekly game management errors and offers no explanation for them, seemingly because he does not even understand what he did wrong and has no ability to learn from those mistakes.
NFL sources have commented for weeks to the Daily News that they can see obvious give-up and lack of effort from Daboll’s team late in games, especially on defense.
“Why are they tolerating this?” one source said. “They” is a reference to ownership.
Daboll also has done something consciously two weeks in a row that should warrant his firing alone: He has put Jaxson Dart‘s health on the line at the end of games that are already decided in order to tack a few extra points onto the optics of the final score.
“They’re going to get him hurt,” a league source said last week after Daboll did it against the Eagles.
It might have gotten Dart hurt on Sunday against the 49ers. The rookie quarterback got smoked by the 49ers’ Tatum Bethune on an open-field scramble with under two minutes remaining and the Giants trailing, 34-17.
Dart came inches away from taking an even worse hit. He was doubled over on the sideline after finishing the touchdown drive, and he took a very long time to trudge around the locker room and prepare himself for his postgame press conference.
This is malpractice from Daboll, just as it was from Dan Quinn on Sunday night leaving Jayden Daniels in that blowout loss to the Seattle Seahawks before his gruesome elbow injury in garbage time.
After the Giants-49ers game, Dart was asked about Daboll’s job security and the possible change that could occur if the losses keep coming.
Dart put the blame on the players, not the coaches, and he has always supported Daboll, the coach who gave him this opportunity. But Dart was also careful not to wade into politicking for anything or anyone.
“I understand the question,” Dart said. “But I am going to give you the answer that I truly feel: I can only control what I can control, and I don’t want to look at things that way.
“I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself in any regard,” he added. “I want to just live in the moment that I have. I want to take advantage of the opportunities that I have. As a team, we should be thinking that same way. We have a chance to win every game that we have on our schedule. That’s how I feel.
The Giants rookie quarterback continued to stress that players need to make the plays on the field.
“We’ve got to find a way as players, the guys who are out there on the field, to make enough plays to win the game, and that’s kind of how I view things,” he said. “The coaches, they call the plays, but a play can technically work against any defense or any coverage or whatever it is. The same thing goes on the defensive side. As players, we’ve got to be better. They are not the ones out there on the field. We are. Us, as a team, need to be better that way.”
Dart is wrong, though. Players can be put in better situations. The Giants can be put in better situations.
A better GM could build a better roster around them. A better coach could create better schemes, could create more discipline and reduce the penalties and motivate their players enough to prevent professionals from tapping out late in games.
It’s also just ridiculous that the security of Schoen and Daboll’s jobs is even a conversation still.
They are 2-7 this season, 3-18 in their last 21 games, 5-21 in their last 26, 5-17-1 in the NFC East, 2-14-0 against the Eagles and Cowboys and 20-39-1 (.342) in four seasons.
They never win.
Daboll’s last card to play was benching Russell Wilson for Dart. He did it. The 0-3 Giants got a brief surge of momentum and won two of three games. But the impact of that sudden upgrade has worn off quickly.
They are 2-4 under Dart, including three consecutive losses. They enter this coming Sunday’s game at the Chicago Bears with a chance to set a new franchise record with 11 straight road losses.
The organization’s inevitable, annual injury problem has cut into the team, as well — with no meaningful change ever occurring to the personnel or accountability of the training staff — and shoulders are sagging in the third and fourth quarters.
Despite all of the Giants’ pitiful output, it still feels like Daboll is under more heat from the organization than Schoen.
There is no objective reason to understand how or why. None of the results back up Schoen deserving to stay, from draft picks to teambuilding to free agency to leaguewide reputation to letting Saquon Barkley walk to the rival Eagles and win a Super Bowl and Offensive Player of the Year.
But the fracturing of the so-called “collaborative” Schoen-Daboll pairing became evident almost a year ago after the Giants’ 3-14 season last January.
Once it was time for blame to be handed out, Daboll could see that Schoen was talking less about ‘we’ and that the GM and coach were being evaluated in many respects as separate entities.
That’s what chilled the Schoen-Daboll dynamic for months coming out of the 2024 season before they regrouped primarily to make the quarterback decision for the NFL Draft.
And that’s the only valid defense of Daboll: not that he deserves to keep his job, but that blaming him alone would be 100% the wrong decision. It would not fully correct what has made the Giants such a bad and dysfunctional operation under this fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants, optics-driven regime.
Monday felt like a day that could have brought some type of change, at least at the defensive coordinator position with Shane Bowen if nothing else, since he would be Daboll’s obvious scapegoat if the coach needed one.
But Daboll said Sunday night of changing defensive play callers: “Look, none of us did a good enough job. That starts with me. We’ll continue to work at it.”
So how about Daboll?
The coach said, in answer to ownership’s edict that the Giants needed better results this season: “We’ve got to continue to improve here. Again, there’s some things that I think are improving, and there’s some things that are not.”
So is he concerned?
“Yeah, look, we are not where we need to be,” Daboll said.
The coach also offered a misplaced declarative statement in the middle of his presser that “Jaxson is the leader of our football team.”
It felt like it was just something Daboll wanted to say. He wanted to remind everyone that Dart is his guy and that he’s on this team and that Dart’s promise should be the story, not the team’s constant losing and mismanagement.
Someone else can coach Dart, though. Someone else can pick better players to play around him.
The Giants crave stability, so they’re reluctant to make sweeping changes. But running in place does nothing for a team that never wins.
To put it in terms Daboll would understand, keeping this GM and coach would be like kicking a field goal on 4th and goal from the 3-yard line while trailing 20-7 deep into a third quarter when the opposing offense is scoring touchdowns.
