Giants' Mike Kafka gets the chance to prove he's the right man for Big Blue
Giants interim coach Mike Kafka speaks with the media in East Rutherford, N.J., on June 5. Credit: Ed Murray
Mike Kafka has interviewed for eight head coaching jobs in the last few years. Some of them were virtual meet-and-greets that lasted an hour or so. Some dragged on throughout the day and into the next one in person.
This ninth one? It’s going to last two months.
The Giants are going to have an exhaustive and thorough search for their next head coach, but the first candidate they will look at is Kafka, their own offensive coordinator and assistant head coach who since Monday’s firing of Brian Daboll has been their interim head coach. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Kafka does enough in the last seven games of this season to earn the job outright.
Interim head coaches often are thrust into these roles before they are ready for it. Kafka is ready for it. He’s presented his vision for what a Kafka-run program would look like to a quarter of the league’s franchises and now, after three-and-a-half years of various responsibilities and roles, he will get to put it into action.
“It was a great conversation,” Kafka said of his talks with Giants ownership on Monday when they tapped him for this job… and this audition. “It was cool to kind of talk through a little bit of my plan that I am going to implement and put into place.”
It is that preparedness that helped make the decision to move on from Daboll a bit easier for the team’s brass. In fact, it may have even made it more necessary. The instincts of the Giants always seem to lean toward maintaining stability. This is only the third time in 101 seasons that the organization has made a change in head coach during the regular season; it happened in 1930 and then not again until 2017 and now in 2025. It would have been somewhat easy to just let Daboll coach out the remainder of this already foregone season and then fire him the Monday after it ended.
Several things went against that plan, though. The first was the series of epic collapses the Giants suffered with four of their eight losses coming in games in which they had double-digit leads. Losing games is one thing, finding new and imaginative ways to do so that require citations from the Elias Sports Bureau to quantify is quite another. How many times this season have we had to say the Giants were the first team since a year none of us can even remember to lose in a certain fashion?
The second is Kafka. Had they kept Daboll, they would not have gotten any idea of Kafka’s capabilities in the role. He certainly would have been a candidate at the end of the season. A strong one, too, given that his presence would provide some continuity for Jaxson Dart into his all-important second year in the league. But they would not have been able to see what he looks like in the role, and they probably would have wound up hiring someone who, unlike any of their past four choices, has head coaching experience.
The Giants have already let Saquon Barkley, Daniel Jones and plenty of others walk out the door and find almost immediate success elsewhere. Imagine the stain on the organization if Kafka left after this miserable season without even getting a chance to run the program and turned out to be one of the best head coaches in the league? Maybe one of the greatest in history?
It sounds absurd, but before they were Hall of Famers and icons, Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry and Bill Belichick were all top assistants for the Giants. Although the Giants had opportunities to hire each of them as their head coach, due to a variety of reasons, those lieutenants never became the general here.
Will Kafka be the next Lombardi or Belichick? Probably not. But ask that question again in January and we’ll all be able to answer it with much more confidence. So too will the Giants.
Right now those shoes are far too big to think about filling anyway. And Kafka shouldn’t be worried about comparing himself to Daboll, either. All he needs to be is himself.
In his first practice he was. Wide receivers coach Mike Groh was late for the workout because he was dealing with Lil’Jordan Humprey being claimed off the practice squad by the Broncos, so Kafka jumped in and started throwing passes to the rest of the receivers in their individual drills.
“He spun it pretty well,” Wan’Dale Robinson said. “You understand why he used to play quarterback. I was like ‘OK Kaf, you can still spin it.’”
It also demonstrated very quickly the kind of head coach he wants to be. The kind who is hands-on. The kind who doesn’t get ruffled by unexpected changes. The type who will jump right in where he sees issues.
“That’s just part of him learning how to be a head coach,” Robinson said.
“If it's not right, fix it,” Kafka said of his guiding principles. “Don't wait and let things just kind of trickle and snowball.”
There is plenty not right with the Giants and Kafka certainly won’t be able to mend all of it. But several players noted how calm and poised Kafka is. That may wind up being the biggest difference for them on the sideline without Daboll around.
“I definitely think he has some fire and passion,” Darius Slayton said of Kafka. “But at the same time, he is probably more of a calmer personality, so that can be helpful, especially in high-pressure games like we’ve been in week in and week out. That calming presence can be beneficial.”
Said Russell Wilson: “I think Kafka has great diligence. He is very smart. He is a guy who has played the game. Obviously, he played quarterback and that is a unique position… I admire how he has handled the process of this change and movement. He has done a good job of remaining calm in the midst of it.”
Kafka’s top influence in his career has been Andy Reid. He was the coach in Philadelphia when the Eagles drafted Kafka out of Northwestern in the fourth round in 2010 and he was the head coach in Kansas City when Kafka joined his staff in 2017. So for the first time since 2017, the Giants will not have a head coach who comes from the Bill Belichick-Nick Saban tree (although Kafka did spend time in 2013 on the New England offseason roster) and for just the third season since 2004, they will have a head coach who does not trace his lineage back to Bill Parcells.
For the Giants, that’s almost as big a change as going from Daboll to Kafka. It will bring new ideas and new perspectives to the organization, even though they have been sitting there the past few years waiting to be tapped into.
“I think the best head coaches I've been around are guys that are confident, poised, have a direction, have a plan, and then go execute the plan,” Kafka said. “If something goes just a little bit differently, then you go back and you adjust. You have flexibility to adjust… Guys that empower players to be their best. Those are things that I've learned over my past that I think are great qualities in a head coach and things that I try to mirror.”
Now he gets a chance to do that for the Giants.
For seven games anyway.
Maybe more.
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.
