Why Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen deserve another shot with the Giants
Giants head coach Brian Daboll, right, and general manager Joe Schoen speak to the media before practice during training camp at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 27, 2022. Credit: Brad Penner
The Giants will begin interviews for their general manager and head coach jobs this week.
First up? The two men who currently hold those positions.
So maybe it won’t be a traditional interview for either of them. But before any decisions are made regarding the direction the franchise takes with its future leadership, Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll are expected to be given a chance to present their cases to ownership for sticking around.
It’s something the Giants allowed Joe Judge to do while he teetered toward unemployment three years ago before eventually (and somewhat reluctantly) letting him go.
The conversations won’t be easy for anyone. Aside from the playoff run in their first season, there isn’t much Schoen and Daboll can point to in defense of their regime over the past two seasons.
This season in particular, which was supposed to be a celebration of 100 years of Giants football, was beyond disappointing. Maybe they’ll at least be able to point to a modest two-game winning streak if they come back from Philadelphia with a win over the Eagles’ backups on Sunday, but that’ll be about it.
And John Mara and Steve Tisch will have every right to express their frustrations from the way the current roster was constructed (or, more specifically, deconstructed) to the way the games were managed (or, more specifically, mismanaged).
Yet if they are wise, they will listen carefully to what their two current frontmen have to say, not so much about the past but about the future and their vision for it.
That’s what Schoen and Daboll will be selling. It’s also what Mara and Tisch should buy.
Mara in particular has been yearning for stability that can stop the merry-go-round of the past decade. That’s what he said when he last spoke on these topics in October.
Of course, he didn’t foresee a franchise-record 10-game losing streak and a messy divorce from the supposed franchise quarterback when he said it. Still, that he hasn’t acted during those dreadful times indicates that he is at least looking for and hoping to hear reasons to keep the two, not to get rid of them.
He saw what patience earned the Giants when they stuck with Bill Parcells through an early three-win season and when they gave Tom Coughlin an opportunity to adjust his style.
That desire for continuity was why he nearly retained the nearly untenable Judge after the disastrous 2021 season, which included just about every errant step a coach can make, from long-winded public diatribes to quarterback sneaks deep in the shadow of the team’s own goal line.
Mara might have been able to live with that, but Dave Gettleman “retired,” and he knew he couldn’t hire a new general manager with a coach already in place. To fix the dysfunctional shambles Gettleman left behind, Judge had to go.
Enter Schoen and Daboll.
They may have arrived together, but the Giants have made it clear that they now are being considered as separate entities. Ownership could decide to retain both, fire both or keep either one and not the other.
The toughest part of that dynamic is that Daboll has ever-so-slightly outperformed Schoen. He took the team they inherited to the playoffs and won a postseason game. He turned Tommy DeVito from a player who couldn’t be trusted to throw a pass in his first NFL game to a workable NFL quarterback. He pushed Drew Lock from the sloppy passer he was through his first few starts this season to the five-touchdown sports car he was last week.
As far as the central issue of their tenure, Daboll was always cooler about Daniel Jones than Schoen, too. And looking back on this past summer’s HBO’s “Hard Knocks” episodes as forensic evidence, he’s the one who was pushing hard for a new quarterback in the 2024 draft, something his general manager couldn’t get done for him.
Most significantly, not a peep has emerged from the locker room, on the record or otherwise, voicing a desire for change or a disgust with Daboll. The players certainly have been given every opportunity to provide them. The sentiment has been unanimous, from offense to defense, rookie to veteran: They think Daboll should return.
Daboll hasn’t been very forthcoming or friendly in his media sessions lately, giving terse replies and non-answers to some specific questions. But that may be an overcompensation to avoid the blathering pitfall Judge fell into. He’s likely saving his arguments for the only audience that matters: His bosses.
He did give a hint of what his main thesis will be, though. After the Giants scored 45 points against the Colts, he noted several times that this is what the offense can and should look like with a quarterback who can actually play.
Schoen? In three years, he has yet to acquire a Pro Bowler. Brian Burns and Malik Nabers are alternates, but if Schoen wants credit for those, then he’d better give Burns the Pro Bowl incentive in his contract too. Of course he won’t.
He secured Dexter Lawrence and Andrew Thomas — picks made by Gettleman — as long-term fixtures, although both are ending this season on IR. His own high draft picks have ranged from promising (Nabers) to reaches (Kayvon Thibodeaux, Deonte Banks) to busts (Evan Neal).
He’s also the one who let Saquon Barkley and Xavier McKinney walk this past offseason, traded Leonard Williams and didn’t resign Julian Love the year before that.
And most damning, is that he chose Jones over all of them.
The best thing Schoen has done as general manager since he arrived may have been to structure Jones’ contract so the Giants could get out of it when they did. But even with that, they’ll still be carrying $22 million in dead money on their 2025 salary cap.
None of this was done in a vacuum, though. There was nothing happening in the dark. Mara didn’t interfere, but he was there for all of it. Even if he did suffer those sleepless nights he spoke about after Barkley signed with the Eagles, he was in the loop on the calls about whom they signed and whom they didn’t, whom they drafted and whom they didn’t.
In other words, Mara knew this season was going to be the painful one that should have come in 2022. He knew the Giants were taking a step backward in 2024 with regard to talent.
The Giants always needed to be torn down to the studs before they could be rebuilt. Their brief postseason joy two seasons ago delayed that process. Now they are smack in the middle of it. The demo work has been uncomfortable and ugly and revealed some issues that weren’t on the original estimate. But the time to go from razing to rising is about to start.
Schoen and Daboll were hired three years ago to do a job. They were brought in to turn the Giants into perennial contenders, to help the organization win a Super Bowl this decade to go with the ones from each of the four previous ones from the 1980s to the 2010s.
They may be slightly off schedule, but they haven’t truly had a chance to begin their charge. Let them. If they still are the same executive and coach the Giants trusted in January 2022, let them.
The Giants gave them the sledgehammers. They need to see what this duo can do with finishing hammers.
Bringing back Schoen and Daboll won’t be an easy decision. It certainly won’t be a popular one. Hardly anyone would blink thrice if they were canned.
It is, however, the right decision to keep them.
No further interviews should be required.
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.
