Many angry and disillusioned Giants fans want a scalp for this mess.
This is a perfectly understandable emotion.
Many want Brian Daboll to pay the price for 2-8 and counting.
Also understandable, because Daboll, after all, is the head coach.
We live in a world right now where Patriots fans, after a couple of down seasons in New England, wanted owner Robert Kraft to leave Bill Belichick in Germany on Sunday after the loss to the Colts, forgetting about the six Lombardi Trophies he helped that franchise win.
If Belichick’s not safe from the wrath of frustrated fans, surely Daboll isn’t.
Remember, though: Many of the same fans who this season are second-guessing Daboll’s every decision and want him gone are the same fans who were saluting him last year for the win at the Titans with that two-point conversion in the opener and slobbering over him when he took the team to the playoffs and won a wild-card game on the road.
Daboll is that same person and coach you were deifying a year ago. The one thing about him that you’ll find that’s different from his most recent predecessors is this: He doesn’t waver.
Daboll, who doesn’t win the press conferences, has been consistent in his approach and his demeanor, and that’s not going to change. He’s seen and been through a lot of good and a lot of bad as an NFL assistant coach and is pretty well-versed as a crisis manager, which is what the Giants need at the moment.
Pat Shurmur came to the Giants as personable and quickly turned paranoid that every decision he made was going to be second-guessed. In the end, Joe Judge finally cracked under the pressure of having no NFL-caliber quarterback to put on the field in Chicago and that was the last straw in his undoing.
Daboll — even with the current quarterback crisis (injuries to starter Daniel Jones and Tyrod Taylor have forced him to start undrafted rookie free agent Tommy DeVito), a roster that’s getting thinner by the minute at critical positions by injuries and a locker room that’s becoming increasingly frustrated — isn’t going to crack and shouldn’t be going anywhere.
The best approach Giants ownership can take is to stay the course with Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen. Let them carry out their plan, a plan that needs to have finding a new franchise quarterback in the 2024 draft at the top of their to-do list.
Daboll and Schoen should be given the opportunity to bring their own quarterback in and develop him. It seems quite clear that Jones, who wasn’t playing well when he was healthy before tearing his ACL, isn’t the answer. DeVito has one more TD pass (three) than Jones does (two) on 106 more attempts.
The Giants are currently in line to draft No. 2 overall, which can certainly improve to No. 1 pending the results of the next seven games.
Barring some completely unforeseen event, such as Tommy DeVito morphing into Tommy Brady, the Giants likely won’t be favored to win any of the seven games except for one. And that one, a home game against the Patriots (who are also 2-8), figures to be intriguing since the Patriots are in the No. 3 draft position.
That’ll sets up as a classic loser-wins game in terms of draft positioning.
Jets fans will forever remember that useless upset win over the Rams in 2020 that cost them a chance at drafting Trevor Lawrence and left them with Zach Wilson as the consolation prize. We’ve all seen how that’s worked out.
The Giants may not want to repeat that mistake if Schoen and Daboll have a conviction about USC’s Caleb Williams, North Carolina’s Drake Maye or another one of the top quarterbacks who’ll be available in the spring.
So, Daboll’s job for these final seven games is to keep the locker room from imploding out of frustration and not let the infuriated fan base adversely affect him. On both of those fronts, he’ll consistently stay the course he’s always on.
“I believe in our process, I believe in what we do,’’ Daboll said Monday. “But certainly, when you don’t get the results those can get questioned and I completely understand that. We’ve established something last year when we got here of how we are going to approach things and how we are going to do things and you build on that in the offseason.
“One season is never the same as the next season, one game is never the same as the next game. I understand this is a results business. Certainly, we have to do it better and that’s what we’re all trying to do. We can all do a better job. That starts with me. We should make no excuses about where we’re at. I own it.’’
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