How Giants coach Brian Daboll can save his job after ugly 0-2 start

One of the first things just about all new head coaches learn is that everyone’s problems become your problems. Whether it is the assistant-to-the-assistant in the equipment room or the starting quarterback, every issue funnels toward one office.

One of the last things head coaches tend to learn? That the inverse is true, too. That your problems become everyone’s problems.

It can be the most difficult aspect of the job to master, and usually by the time they realize it, it’s already too late to do anything about it. They’re out the door, bye-bye, and the cycle begins anew.

Brian Daboll is nearing that ultimate lesson.

In an effort to fix many of the handicaps that befell last year’s team, Daboll spent the past few months consolidating responsibility upon himself. He took over the offensive play-calling. He hired the defensive coordinator and staff.

Had it worked out for the betterment of the team, it would have been a power move. Standing here at 0-2, it just means there is nowhere else for those flaws to flow.

Daboll’s job security now depends on how well he can clean up the messes he himself has made through the first two weeks of this season.

He’s not at the firing point yet, and there still is plenty of time to make corrections as the leader of the Giants. After all, he’s already proved he can win here with a flawed team full of shortcomings, which gives him some leeway.

But that grace is quickly evaporating. So is the patience from fans. And thus from ownership. And thus from Daboll himself.

How do we know about the last two? Because after Sunday’s loss to the Commanders, Daboll was asked about his job security. Instead of brushing it off with a quick non-answer about being focused on the next game or correcting the film or whatever the Coaching 101 guidebook says these guys should spew when such questions come up — never mind when they come up in September — he gave credence to the idea in the form of icy eye daggers for the reporter who asked it.

All that did was show that the pressure Daboll has put on himself is starting to get to him, that he may in fact be wondering about his own future just as all the rest of us are beginning to do.

Daboll’s predecessor, who seemed to have a pretty good chance to return at even very late stages of his final season, was undone by a 10-minute verbal rant after an inexplicable loss. If Daboll eventually is ousted, we may come to recognize those 10 seconds of simmering, staring silence as his antipodal epitaph after this one.

So how can Daboll avoid Joe Judge’s fate? First of all, he needs to stop coming up with creative and unique ways to lose. Scoring three touchdowns, allowing none and falling in regulation? No team had ever done that in regulation in NFL history before the Giants on Sunday against Washington. It joins the catalog of mismanaged opportunities for victories that Daboll has overseen to failure within the last year, including the losses to the Jets and Bills in 2023.

Second is to keep this team from sinking into the sullen swamp that now surrounds it. Daboll can talk all he wants about how he’s been part of teams that started 0-2 and wound up doing pretty well. He’s pointed several times to the Patriots in 2001, when he was in his second year in the NFL as a defensive assistant. It’s accurate but meaningless. There are current Giants who were not even born when that happened. Don’t lose the locker room. Keep them playing hard.

Third: Ignore the heat. Laugh it off. Pretend it’s not there. Don’t let ’em see you sweat. No more evil eyes!

Finally — and this may be the most difficult part even though it sounds the easiest — just find a way to win. Any way, anyhow. Win to give himself and the team a taste of victory, swat away the circling vultures, get a quick glimpse of some blue skies that have been obscured for too long, and exhale.

This season isn’t all Daboll’s doing. He didn’t want Saquon Barkley, the best player on his one playoff team, to walk out in free agency. He wanted to try molding a hand-selected rookie quarterback, even if it was only to buy himself another few years on the job, the way he did in Buffalo. He was overruled on some of those decisions.

And Daboll is not the one who keeps shorting his own options on game days by leaving the roster with fewer than the 53 allotted active players, as it has been in each of these first two weeks. His power goes only so far. He can thank his pal, general manager Joe Schoen, for those calls.

But once the Giants are on the field for their games, everything falls on Daboll. Right now it’s falling, all right, hard and fast, with little sign of letting up.

Daboll’s miscalculations certainly have played a very large part in that forecast. The Giants have been outcoached in both losses so far, both before and during the actual contests.

Daboll chose to have it that way in the offseason. He amalgamated control, knowing his was going to be either the face of credit or blame for whatever took place.

He’d waited nearly a quarter-century as an assistant in the league to get the head-coaching job and wanted to make darn sure he wasn’t going to lose it because of someone else’s shortcomings.

So now he’s left to try to overcome his own.

If he can, it will be a lesson learned, one not every coach is afforded the opportunity to absorb. If he can’t, well, maybe the next guy will be able to figure it all out somewhat faster.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.