Giants don't have a coaching problem, they have a players problem
Giants head coach Brian Daboll and quarterback Tommy DeVito walk off the field after a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Brian Burns said the Giants need to “grow up” and start paying attention to the details of the in-game situations and their assignments. Dexter Lawrence said his teammates need to be “mentally locked in on every play” and “show up” on game days.
This wasn’t their fiery, pointed message after Sunday’s embarrassing, overmatched, malaise-filled 23-point loss to the Buccaneers. It’s what they were saying publicly in the locker rooms after losses a month ago. And probably in private among the rest of the players for months before that.
It’s one of the reasons why their frustrations with this team are becoming more and more pointed and more and more explosive with every passing loss, and why the two of them — and others — used some rather unprintable words to describe the most recent performance, perhaps the most vulgar of which we can use here being “soft.”
Brian Daboll, who tamps down his well-known temper and takes a calmer approach when discussing this team in his news conferences, has been trying to hammer away at this season with a similar message to the one that Burns and Lawrence try to deliver.
None of it, by the way, is showing any signs of working.
The easy blame route is to point at the lack of leadership. People will say Daboll has lost the ear of the team or that there is a leadership vacuum. It is true that the Giants have gotten rid of an inordinate amount of captains from previous seasons including Saquon Barkley, Xavier McKinney and Leonard Williams. And their two appointed offensive C-bearers this year, Andrew Thomas and Daniel Jones, have had their seasons end on drastically different terms but end nonetheless.
At some point, though, it needs to fall on the masses to be led. The Giants may not have a leadership issue so much as they have a follower issue.
The young, inexperienced, in-over-their-heads players who aren’t getting any better despite the daily pushes and prods from those trying to mush them along to success seem to be more of a reason for these recent woes than what is happening at the top of the roster’s flowchart.
“Leaders on this team try to set as good an example as they can out there on the field and in the meeting rooms, the position rooms,” veteran guard Jon Runyan Jr. said on Monday. “I don’t want to call anybody out, but for certain people you can only do so much for them. There comes a point where the execution and the detail isn’t there.”
Lost causes among the hoi polloi. That’s the root cause of this abomination of a season.
“Everybody has to take ownership of their position group and as a whole, the offensive and defensive units,” Runyan said. “Those details, the lack of execution, turning into a weekly thing, it’s something we’ve been trying to figure out for this month plus and still haven’t gotten it.”
It’s why when Burns was asked on Sunday if the coaching staff’s message is getting through, he said: “I would like to think so.”
On the face of it that comes across as less than an absolute “yes,” which is an indictment against Daboll and an admission that the players are tuning him out. But Burns quickly clarified what he meant.
“The reason I say ‘I would like to think that’ is because everybody has the right answers,” he said. “It’s just not showing up where it needs to show up.”
And not in the people it needs to show up in.
Part of the problem is that the Giants are not deep enough to do anything about this issue. If Deonte Banks dogs a play or Darius Muasau whiffs on a tackle or Adoree’ Jackson flagrantly mugs a receiver on an uncatchable ball in the end zone for a penalty or Armon Watts gets blocked into Dexter Lawrence just as he is about to make a tackle, there just aren’t bodies behind them to do better.
When John Michael Schmitz gets pancaked by Vita Vea for a sack before Tommy DeVito can get to the top of his drop or Theo Johnson has a pass go through his hands or Tyrone Tracy Jr. fumbles in a critical, momentum-shifting situation for the second game in a row, there aren’t many options otherwise.
As Lawrence said Sunday, “It’s the little [expletive] that keeps popping up from one play after another play after another play.”
Daboll is certainly responsible for some of the sickening football we have seen from the Giants this season. And if things get worse, it may very well wind up costing him this job.
But the Giants aren’t 2-9 because his message is wrong. The losses aren’t because the techniques he and his staff are teaching are flawed or the plays he calls are consistently misguided. They’re all the same ones he was offering up two years ago when he was the NFL Coach of the Year.
Obviously, something needs to change but swapping the coach would be a wasteful mistake without fixing the clogged ears and stubborn reluctance for improvement that too many current players appear to have.
Give Daboll and these current leaders a better class of listeners and learners instead and their lessons will come back to life — along with the Giants themselves.
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.
