Brian Daboll and the case for him keeping his job: Anything else besides Dart?
Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, center right, and head coach Brian Daboll, center left, talk on the sidelines during an NFL game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Oct. 9 at MetLife Stadium. Credit: AP
Brian Daboll still has one very big advantage when it comes to keeping his job beyond this season. Every week that Jaxson Dart plays and improves and is able to walk off the field — as he did on Sunday against the 49ers despite yet another dreadful and embarrassing loss — is a new reinforcement to the argument for a fifth year of Daboll’s tenure with the Giants.
That’s how important finding and developing a young quarterback is in this league. Get that part right and the rest is supposed to be easy. It overarches almost everything else that a football franchise has to consider.
But it’s the “almost everything else” that ultimately could doom Daboll.
Right now he has nothing he can point to beyond Dart as an example of something going well, an area in which progress is being made, or even a glimmer of hope that can be built upon. Nothing other than the quarterback situation is working the way it should be for the Giants.
They are 2-7 for the third straight year. They have won three of their last 21 games. After winning nine regular-season games and a road playoff game in the 2022 season, when Daboll was named NFL Coach of the Year, he and the Giants are 11-32 in the 2 1⁄2 seasons since.
“Nothing’s good enough,” Daboll said on Monday. “Offense, defense, kicking game, we all can be better. That’s what we’re all working toward. It’s not one person, it’s not one play, it’s not one side of the ball. It’s the collective, and that’s my responsibility.”
Daboll has that quarterback ace in his hand, yes, but it won’t be enough unless he can start pairing it with other positives. Anything, really. He has about two months to figure out how to do that, or the likeliest scenario is that the next stage of Dart’s career will be under the tutelage of another coach.
That is not what the Giants want. It might not even be something they can handle at this point. John Mara remains in control of the organization as its president and CEO through his current cancer treatments, but it’s unclear whether he would have the stamina or stomach for the significant overhaul that changing coaches — and potentially the general manager — would require from him.
The planes that fly over MetLife Stadium when the Giants play there beg Mara to clean house and fire everyone. He ignored those aerial pleas last year. Now it’s again up to Daboll to provide him an alternative plan and a vision for the future.
But it has to start now, and it can’t simply be: We have Dart and the rest will take care of itself. This year illustrates that it clearly will not.
There are reasons (some will call them excuses) for all of it. Injuries have sidelined key players on both offense and defense. Personnel pieces who had been banished to the bench or had been part of the practice squad now are being asked to step into starting roles, and it is not going well.
Things that go far beyond coaching — dropped passes, insufficient desire in tackling, even missed field goals from trusted veterans at makeable distances — are failing the Giants.
Asked what needs to change to turn things around, guard Jon Runyan Jr. said on Monday: “That’s definitely the big question. If we were able to pinpoint what that would be, we would be in a lot better place.”
When there is no answer to that question, more often than not, the answer, by default, becomes the coach.
Dart was asked about Daboll’s job security and his obvious role in it on Sunday. It was the first time the topic was broached publicly with the quarterback.
“I understand the question, 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,” he said of the burden of having to not just navigate his rookie season but simultaneously save the job of the coach who believed in him enough to draft him. “I want to just live in the moment that I have. I want to take advantage of the oppor tunities that I have.”
Then he added: “As players, we’ve got to be better. [The coaches] are not the ones out there on the field. We are. Us, as a team, need to be better that way.”
That’s true.
Right now it’s Daboll who needs it the most, though. It’s Daboll who needs it quickly.
He came into this season banking on Dart to save his job. It would be the great irony of his tenure if it turned out to be everything else but Dart that lost it.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
