Brian Daboll Crashed Out. Now Can the Giants Cash In?

Someone once told me that when a person yells, it’s because they’re scared. As head coach of the New York Giants, Brian Daboll yelled a lot. When Daboll was hired by New York in 2022, his motto—which became the team’s motto—was “Smart, tough, and dependable.” The Giants put the phrase on everything, from the walls of their facility to their sweatshirts. Unfortunately under Daboll, the only thing you could depend on the Giants for was losing.

Daboll’s Giants lost big, lost late, and lost often: Their record over Daboll’s three and a half seasons in charge was 20-40-1. The “smart” from his motto became “scared.” A prime example is the loss against the Bears on Sunday: The Giants were afraid of a potential backlash against elevating Jameis Winston over Russell Wilson as backup QB, which cost them dearly when Wilson ended up playing haplessly once again in relief of Jaxson Dart. “Tough” was replaced by “reckless,” especially with how Daboll deployed Dart. Dart’s rushing prowess became the focus of the offense this season, and he’s been evaluated for a concussion four times—including against Chicago, when he was diagnosed with one. So after the Giants blew a 10-point fourth-quarter lead against the Bears on Sunday—their fourth blown double-digit lead of the year—and managed to lose Dart in the process, it wasn’t surprising that New York decided to fire Daboll on Monday morning.

Bill Parcells famously said that you are what your record says you are. The Giants have started 2-8 for the third year in a row. Over the past three seasons, they have won 25 percent of their games, the second-worst winning percentage in the NFL (ahead of only the Titans). Since Daboll was hired in 2022, the Giants have lost 21 games by double-digit points. Only the Carolina Panthers have more of those losses in that stretch—and that includes New York’s run to the playoffs in Daboll’s first season. In 2024, the Giants were last in the league in average time of possession with a lead, and first in average time of possession while trailing. This year, they have introduced the added flare of blown leads, punctuated by the infamous Denver game, in which they were up 18 points with six minutes to go and lost. Previously, teams that had been up 18 points with six minutes left had been 1,602-0.

During the Tom Coughlin era in New York, the Giants installed an Aristotle quote near Justin Tuck’s locker that read, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” If the Giants have a habit of losing, what does that make them?

Somewhere during all that losing, Daboll went from a revered, gutsy coach to someone much more timid. His first game as Giants head coach was against the Titans, and after a late score that brought his team within a point of tying Tennessee, he made the aggressive decision to go for two, forgoing a tie and playing for the win. The Giants got the conversion and won the game. Flash forward to Week 10 this season in Chicago, and the Giants were kicking field goals from the Bears’ half-yard line rather than going for broke—this in a game they eventually lost by four. This type of decision-making represents a wider mentality shift for Daboll, as the ambitions of his Giants tenure went from winning to not losing.

Amazingly, the losing may not even be what got Daboll fired. His true sin was seemingly putting his short-term job security over Dart’s long-term health. Giants co-owner John Mara all but said at the end of last season that New York needed to seriously improve in 2025 if Daboll was going to save his job. And as the season started to slip away, Daboll seemed to take more and more risks with Dart’s health.

Dart has gotten hit a lot this season. He has recorded 33 designed runs so far, second among quarterbacks to only Justin Fields, even though he did not start the first month of the season. And since Dart first started a game in Week 4, only Justin Herbert has taken more hits on average than Dart’s 13 per game. It seems important to note that Herbert, unlike Dart, is down approximately five offensive tackles. Herbert has also been taking those hits in close games. Dart is taking shots in garbage time.

Two good examples of this came recently. In Week 9 against the 49ers, Dart tossed a touchdown pass while his team was down 17 points with 90 seconds left, and then went to the sideline and put his head in his hands, seemingly in pain. In practice the week after, he was not listed on the injury report.

Also, against the Eagles in Week 8, the Giants were down 25 points with under three minutes to go—absolute garbage time—and Daboll called a quarterback keeper on third-and-3. This was not an RPO or a read-option. This was a quarterback run while down 25 points with three minutes left. Dart got drilled.

After taking hits like that, it’s no wonder that Dart’s been evaluated for a concussion so many times this year (not to mention the separate hamstring injury he’s suffered). One of those evaluations was the infamous one in Week 6 where Daboll was seen screaming at a team doctor on national television (again, a lot of yelling). That prompted an NFL investigation and ultimately a memo reminding coaches to, and I am paraphrasing here, stay the fuck away from the concussion evaluations.

Every Giants fan—and I know, because I am a Giants fan–—has held the same opinion about Dart over the past month: He’s talented, he has it, and he needs to take fewer hits. That mounting contact has clearly been affecting Dart more and more as the season’s gone on. “Dart looks like he went 15 rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime after every game,” Athletic Giants reporter Dan Duggan wrote on November 7. “He slowly shuffles around the locker room and then makes it to his news conference almost an hour after the game ends.”

This was even more frustrating considering that 2025 had quickly become a lost year for New York. The only thing Giants fans cared about this season was keeping Dart healthy—especially in a year when Malik Nabers and our beloved Tasmanian devil Cam Skattebo had already gone down with injuries. But then, Daboll has always been too eager to use his starting QB as a battering ram, going back to his time running Buffalo’s offense with Josh Allen and his New York offenses with Daniel Jones.

All of this is the prologue for this week, when Dart kept the ball on a third-quarter play against the Bears, took a hit, and seemed to be knocked out on the field.

Somehow, he briefly re-entered the game and played a snap before he was officially removed and evaluated. Daboll said after the game that he did not know what play Dart was injured on, but he removed Dart after he “didn’t look right.”

Daboll does deserve some credit for having the vision to see Dart’s talent when he was a prospect—and the chutzpah to convince general manager Joe Schoen and Giants ownership to trade up and get him in the first round of the 2025 draft. In just seven games, it’s become clear that Dart has something the rest of the league missed. But since the team’s playoff run after the 2022 season, Daboll has been unable to win with the Giants in the present. And if he’s also failing to protect New York’s future, then he should have no role with the team.

For the first time in years, New York has a truly talented young core. Dart, Nabers, and pass rusher Abdul Carter are all 22 years old. All-Pro left tackle Andrew Thomas is 26. Defensive end Brian Burns, who coleads the NFL in sacks with Myles Garrett, is 27, and deeply overqualified rotational pass rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux, the former fifth pick in the draft, is 24. All-Pro defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence is having a down season but is just 27 and the oldest member of this group. New York has a promising quarterback on a rookie contract, an elite-looking receiver on a rookie contract, a stalwart left tackle, and a loaded defensive line.

They need cornerbacks and may need to upgrade the majority of their offensive line, but the most important—and expensive—positions on the roster are already accounted for. Worst-to-first divisional turnarounds have been spawned from much less.

So whoever New York hires as its next coach could either keep the franchise in the 15-year spiral that’s landed the Giants in the company of the Jets, Browns, and Raiders as the embarrassments of the or relaunch this franchise as a competitive football team.

Schoen will oversee this search, which is interesting considering he and Daboll were brought in together in 2022. On one hand, Schoen gets unfair blame for Jones’s contract extension in 2023 and for Saquon Barkley going to the Eagles in free agency in 2024. There’s a chance that Schoen didn’t want to sign Jones, but was overruled by ownership (which would also explain why ownership might not want to ditch him now). And if the Giants had re-signed Barkley for three years and $40 million, he probably would have made the team one win better—maybe they’d have gone 4-13 instead of 3-14—and everyone would have mocked New York for paying a running back.

However, Schoen deserves the blame for a number of mistakes, including:

Drafting cornerback Deonte Banks (who’s been laughably bad) over cornerback Joey Porter Jr. in 2023

Whiffing on offensive lineman Evan Neal in 2022

Reaching for receiver Wan’Dale Robinson (a 5-foot-8 guy) with the 43rd pick

Letting safeties Xavier McKinney and Julian Love go and replacing them with the disappointing second-rounder Tyler Nubin

The credit for drafting Dart seems to mostly go to Daboll, who wanted him. Frankly, after Dart and Nabers, the Giants’ best-drafted players are mostly holdovers from the Dave Gettleman era.

Now, it seems that Schoen may be staying on for stability’s sake—or maybe he possesses a deft ability to manage up. And whatever choice he makes in this next hiring cycle could mark the most important coaching decision the Giants have made since they kept Coughlin for the 2007 season. Coughlin had made back-to-back playoff appearances and still nearly lost his job, but the standards were higher then. Hopefully the next coach can raise the bar once again.

Interim head coach Mike Kafka will get the first crack at this, and he should be taken seriously as a candidate if Dart flourishes under him the rest of the year. Seattle offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak deserves an interview after what he has done with the Seahawks this year, and Washington offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury certainly warrants at least an interview after overseeing Jayden Daniels’s success. Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who served the same role for the Giants during their 2007 Super Bowl run, is a worthy candidate if New York cannot land one of their preferred offensive coaches. Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, who just pantsed Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers on Sunday Night Football, is also surely to be a name floated. The Giants could even potentially trade draft picks to Denver for head coach Sean Payton if Payton's relationship with the Broncos sours.

The only good news from this Daboll tenure is that he left the Giants with Dart—in which case, he may have ultimately done the franchise more good than harm. Daboll crashed out. Now New York must cash in.

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