Brian Daboll has gotten his big break at age 46, a dream NFL job that must have seemed like the wildest fantasy more than two decades ago, when he arrived at Bill Belichick’s door in Foxborough just trying to make it from one day to the next.
“He lent me a car for my first six months,” Daboll once told me of Belichick, “just so I could get around in 2000, when I had absolutely nothing and was just grinding away.”
Belichick was just starting out in New England and Daboll, Nick Saban’s grad assistant at Michigan State, was along for the bumpy ride. The Patriots lost 13 of Belichick’s first 18 games and lost their $100 million quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, to a serious injury before a dimpled sixth-rounder, Tom Brady, jogged onto the field and turned pro football upside down.
All these years later, as head coach of the Giants, Daboll can’t expect any of Dave Gettleman’s late picks to rise up out of nowhere and save his team from itself. In fact, Daboll can’t expect any of Gettleman’s early picks to do that, either. His Giants are far worse than the 8-8 Pete Carroll team that Belichick inherited in New England, which means Daboll’s former colleague in Buffalo, new Giants general manager Joe Schoen, has no choice but to be a far better evaluator than his predecessor.
It also means Daboll needs to be almost as good as Belichick to conquer this monumental challenge and ultimately lead the Giants back into championship contention.
“Over the last four years,” Schoen said, “I have observed first-hand Brian’s strengths as a leader — he is an excellent communicator, intelligent, innovative, and hard working. Brian’s genuine and engaging personality is refreshing. He fosters relationships with the players and coaches around him. He is progressive in his vision and values collaboration, two of the attributes we think are essential.”
So right there, in quotes released by the Giants, Schoen tells you why he picked Daboll (with the blessing of owners John Mara and Steve Tisch) over former Dolphins coach Brian Flores, whose impressive game-day work couldn’t make his relationship issues with his GM (Chris Grier), quarterback (Tua Tagovailoa) and a number of assistants disappear. Above all, Schoen wanted a coach who connected with co-workers and forever searched for common ground. Daboll represented a guarantee on that front, and his runner-up did not.
Given that Flores won 19 games the past two seasons without a top quarterback and beat Belichick four times in three years, I thought he was the best man for the job. I thought that he could grow from his mistakes, as many young coaches who are fired the first time around do, and that his experience gave him an edge over Daboll, who, like Joe Judge and Ben McAdoo before him, now tackles his first big job in the nation’s biggest market.
But Daboll is certainly a qualified coach whose strength matches up with the Giants’ biggest weakness — scoring, or lack thereof. The Giants averaged 15.2 points per game in 2021, worse than every other NFL team not named the Jaguars. The best team in their division, the Cowboys, averaged 31.2.
Daboll is about to find out it’s a lot easier to close gaps like that when your quarterback is named Josh Allen, rather than Daniel Jones.
But hey, the Giants’ new head coach did help Sean McDermott take the AFC East away from Belichick, no small feat. Years before that, Daboll pulled off an even tougher trick — he convinced Belichick to hire him a second time despite the fact he’d left him in 2007 to work for Eric Mangini and the Jets, of all people and of all teams.
And yet Daboll was never seen as a Belichickian candidate here. Flores fit the mold of the ex-Pats tough guy, like Judge, and that probably didn’t help him. When the Giants’ decision makers met with Daboll and Flores, they were struck by the differences in their personalities. The Mara Giants usually prefer extreme intensity in their head coaches, and Flores had all of that the way Tom Coughlin once had it. But this time around, in what Tisch called “an incredibly difficult decision for John, Joe, and me,” the Giants chose to go with an established lighter touch, rather than a candidate (Flores) who would have to follow Coughlin’s lead and temper his approach.
Mara described his new man as a dynamic leader. Tisch said it was obvious that Daboll “has spent his career preparing for this moment.”
Of course, it’s one thing to prepare for a massive rebuilding job and quite another to live through one. “I have a pretty good idea where our fan base’s feelings are right now,” Daboll said, “and I get it.”
Actually, after the Giants put their fans through seven double-digit-loss seasons in the last eight years, Daboll has no idea. But he’s about to find out the hard way.
Daboll helped Belichick win five rings in Foxborough. He’ll need to be almost as good as Belichick — and everything Judge wasn’t — to win just one in East Rutherford.