National Football League

This time, Giants must stand by their coach no matter how bad things get

Published Oct. 17, 2023 5:48 p.m. ET

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Ralph Vacchiano

NFC East Reporter

It would be crazy to blame Brian Daboll for everything that's gone wrong with the New York Giants this year. It would be unfair to fault him for the injuries, the underachieving and the too-high expectations. And it would really be insane to make him the fall guy if this season keeps getting worse.

In fact, it would be unthinkable that John Mara would even consider something as nuts as firing a coach two years into a rebuilding project.

Except, of course, that he did it two years ago … and two years before that … and two years before that, too.

That's not to suggest that Daboll is or even should be on the hot seat because of this miserable and wildly disappointing 1-5 start to the Giants season. It's just pointing out that the office chair he inherited never really had a chance to cool down. The Giants he came to work for aren't the stable, patient and sane organization they used to be in their better eras.

They've changed coaches so often since Tom Coughlin ended his 12-year tenure in New York, George Steinbrenner would've been jealous and proud.

But hopefully Mara and his co-owner Steve Tisch have learned their painful lesson from their impulsive, house-cleaning moves of the last six years. They've had four coaches in that span — five if you count the one who served as an interim — and that's just ridiculous. It's also no way to operate a professional sports franchise — or a supposedly professional organization of any kind.

So no matter how bad this season gets, no matter how much it hurts, they can't let Daboll suffer the same fate as Joe Judge … and Pat Shurmer … and Ben McAdoo, too. They need to stand by their man, no matter what, because patience really can be a virtue in sports. They need to give Daboll the one commodity they refused to give his predecessors.

Time.

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Now, if this all seems like a wildly premature and speculative topic … well, yeah. It is. But that's what the Giants get for the way they've operated their business since they marshaled Coughlin out the door on Jan. 4, 2016. McAdoo led the Giants to the playoffs and an 11-5 record and the playoffs in his first season, but was then fired 12 games into his second season. Shurmur was the "adult" the Giants needed to clean up a dysfunctional locker room, but he only got two years to do it. And Judge was the Giants' central-casting vision of a coach — their little Bill Belichick. His players loved him, until they started not to, and then he was gone, too.

Sure, there were extenuating circumstances, because there always are. McAdoo conspired with then-general manager Jerry Reese to unceremoniously bench a franchise icon in quarterback Eli Manning. Shurmur's teams were an embarrassing 9-23. Judge got a little wacky towards the end and was carried out in the fired Dave Gettleman's wake.

But in the end, the ugly bottom line was the same: None of them really got a chance to fully implement their vision and to show what they could do, because it takes more than two years to really build a program. By the time each of them were being shoved out the door they had barely begun reshaping the locker room and roster in their preferred image.

As the Giants have shown, a sports franchise can't thrive even a little bit when the rebuilding plan is set on fire every 24 months.

That almost certainly won't be the case this time. Mara took a big leap by hiring a GM from outside the organization and he pledged that Joe Schoen would get the necessary time to turn his team into a perennial contender. And Mara could see that Year 1 would be mostly about fixing the salary cap mess he inherited and building the team through the draft.

Daboll is Schoen's hand-picked coach—his old buddy from their days together in Buffalo. Daboll, in case anyone forgot, was also the NFL's Coach of the Year last year. His encore performance has been lacking, for sure. His vaunted offensive coaching abilities have been missing in action. It's stunning how non-competitive the Giants have been in too many games, and that absolutely falls on him.

But again, this is Year 2 of a project that nobody thought would take just two years. The 9-7-1 record and the playoff win last year were fool's gold from an overachieving team. This team that Schoen built and that Daboll is coaching still has far too many holes in key positions.

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There's a good chance things will get worse before they get better. The Giants aren't going 1-16 — at least they're probably not. But one look at the schedule and it's easy to see how they can be a 12- or 13-loss team by the time it's over. And if this neck injury to quarterback Daniel Jones becomes a repeat of 2021 — when they went from public optimism that he'd play each week to him suddenly being out for the season — they might have a real chance to compete for the No. 1 pick in the 2024 NFL Draft.

And if the worst happens, if the Giants bottom out again, this is what Mara and Tisch have to do: Nothing. Throw a chair through a window if they want. Punch a hole in a wall. Even scream every night into a pillow. But other than that, they can't give into their worst impulses and start all over again. They can't keep running the organization like a circus, constantly packing up their tent and moving on to another, hopefully better destination. 

If they really want to build a solid foundation, they need to give the people they hired time to make it stick. And that means taking their lumps now and standing pat, hoping that better days are ahead, instead of buying another ticket on the offseason coaching carousel.

Again, Daboll's job probably isn't in jeopardy. This whole thought is probably an unnecessary exercise. The Giants coach might not end up in trouble, no matter what happens the rest of the way.

Of course, there was a time the world thought that about McAdoo and Shurmur and Judge in their second seasons. So with the Giants' recent history, it's impossible to rule out that ownership's worst impulses won't win in the end. But they have to try to stop it. This time they have to be smart, not reactionary.

They have to fight off whatever urges they seem to get every two years, and stand by their coach no matter how bad things get.

Ralph Vacchiano is the NFC East reporter for FOX Sports, covering the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

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