Brian Daboll won NFL Coach of the Year and then stopped winning just about anything.
The Giants fired Daboll on Monday, sources told The New York Post, in the aftermath of their fourth loss this season featuring a blown double-digit lead and a fourth-quarter meltdown.
Daboll’s four-year tenure began with great promise in 2022: The Giants started 7-2 and later won their first playoff game since Super Bowl 46, which earned him top honours among his peers.
It’s been all downhill since, including an 11-33 record since the start of 2023 and a 5-22 record since the start of 2024 to drop his overall mark to 20-40-1 (5-17-1 against the NFC East). This is the third straight season of 2-8 after 10 games.
“I believe in the guys we have in the room, coaches and players,” Daboll, 50, said after Sunday’s loss to the Bears.
“But we lost another tough one, so we have to start doing it.”
Time’s up.
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Daboll’s .336 career winning percentage is the 18th worst in NFL history among coaches with at least 50 games, but his .250 clip since 2023 would be the fifth-worst behind even Giants predecessors Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge.
The Giants are turning to offensive coordinator and assistant head coach Mike Kafka — who has been at Daboll’s side from day one — as interim head coach for the final seven games, per multiple reports. Kafka was runner-up for the Saints head coach position in February.
The spotlight now shifts to the future of general manager Joe Schoen, whose premium draft-pick misses have hamstrung the roster.
New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll. AP Photo/Matt RourkeSource: AP
Back when things were at their apex and Daboll was a New York celebrity, Giants owner John Mara warned Daboll, “In this business, it doesn’t take long to go from Bono to Bozo.”
Daboll never donned a red nose but his behaviour sometimes fit the bill.
Feuding behind the scenes with defensive coordinator Wink Martindale and undercutting the defensive coaching staff led to Martindale walking out of the building in January 2024. The defense has never recovered – in part because Daboll’s reputation for being hard to work for limited the desirable candidates to replace Martindale – despite pricey player investments.
Sideline blowups became a regular part of Daboll’s personality, whether it was icy stares at his coordinators, screaming at team doctors or disgustedly flipping an iPad at former quarterback Daniel Jones.
Flouting of the NFL’s concussion protocol by peeking his head into the sideline medical tent to interrupt Jaxson Dart’s exam cost Daboll a $100,000 (AU$153,000) fine earlier this season.
Not only did Daboll — in his successful attempt to become a player-friendly coach — rarely admonish players publicly, but a lack of accountability in terms of lost playing time for lack of effort and missed assignments also became a hallmark of his style.
Hired over New York native Brian Flores because of his Bills-bred relationship with Schoen and his reputation as a quarterback guru who developed Josh Allen, Daboll proved a mismatched personality with Jones. That relationship impeded the Giants’ progress even after Schoen and Daboll committed a four-year, $160 million (AU$245 million) contract to Jones.
When that experiment failed, Daboll was allowed a big voice in the quarterback search and he bet his career on drafting Dart, who has been sensational enough through seven starts to make the rest of the league second-guess its scouting departments.
But Daboll added injury to insult against the Bears.
Punch thrown causes Payne ejection | 00:24
Daboll’s refusal to coach Dart into sliding on scrambles and his approval of play calls that leave the rookie quarterback susceptible to injury made the predictable happen and put the future of the franchise at risk: Dart has been checked for a concussion four times since the preseason and didn’t pass Sunday’s test.
The Daboll Giants set one franchise record with 10 straight losses last season and set another Sunday with their 11th straight road loss. The active skid accounts for allowing 23 points in the fourth quarter and overtime against the Cowboys in Week 3, 33 points in the fourth quarter against the Broncos in Week 7 and 14 points in the final four minutes against the Bears.
Daboll’s struggle to correctly manage the game-day roster — particularly at kicker — has proved costly in close games. And only the Panthers have scored fewer points per game over the last three seasons.
“It’s a bottom-line business,” Mara said last January after deciding to keep Schoen and Daboll.
“You’re judged on what your record is, and our record is pretty lousy right now. I get that and I take responsibility for that.”
This is just the second time since 1976 that the Giants have fired a head coach in-season. The other instance happened after Ben McAdoo benched the legendary Eli Manning (with ownership’s permission) in 2017 and had a locker room full of questionable characters disobeying team rules.
The axe fell on two coordinators and six assistant coaches from Daboll’s staffs before it fell on the top.
This article orignally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission
