Brian Daboll just being himself when introduced as Giants head coach
Brian Daboll finished his first news conference, went back to his office and saw the blinking light that indicated a voicemail awaited him. He punched in his code and listened to the message from his wife, Beth.
"What the hell was that?" she asked.
This was in 2009 in Cleveland, Daboll’s first season as an NFL offensive coordinator, and the first time in his professional life that he had to stand behind a bank of microphones, stare into a bunch of cameras and answer questions fired at him one after another.
"It stunk," he recalled of the performance. "I was trying to be someone that I really wasn’t."
Lesson learned.
Daboll was introduced as the new head coach of the Giants on Monday and was, by all accounts, very much himself. There was no posturing, no thunderous rhetoric. There were no promises, no proclamations. Just a funny, folksy, comfortable guy who chided reporters he’d never met before for walking in late and for their New York accents.
"How’s everybody doin’?" were his first public remarks after he strode to the podium as if he were doing a set at Governor’s Comedy Club. He spoke for about two minutes, thanked a bunch of folks, then opened it up for questions.
It’s always unfair to make comparisons between one head coach and another, but given the similarity in their backgrounds — both worked for Nick Saban and Bill Belichick — it was impossible to ignore the contrast between Daboll and his predecessor, Joe Judge.
Judge owned the day when he was hired, making a soaring speech that at the time sounded like just what the Giants needed but in retrospect was a harbinger of the meandering 11-minute oration in early January after a loss to Chicago that helped doom his tenure with the team.
Daboll brought none of that with him on Monday. No one came away from his news conference ready to run through the proverbial wall for him. Heck, at one point, he looked down in the front row and noticed his remarks had put his 4-year-old son Luke to sleep.
But a guy doesn’t have to pummel the news conference into submission to win it. Daboll used it and made it work for him. It was easy to see how he can make connections with people, whether it be the new general manager who hired him because of their time together in Buffalo and the shared vision they now have for the Giants, or the players he’ll have on the field with him come September.
"I think you saw a little bit of that in that press conference," co-owner John Mara said. "He’s very genuine and down-to-earth. He believes in having relationships with people. He’s a people person and I think he will fit very well in the building."
The Giants didn’t hire Daboll to emcee banquets and host talk shows, of course. He’s their head coach. He’ll have to do some unpleasant things that might make him unlikable, too.
"I think he can be tough when he needs to be tough," Mara said.
Daboll agreed. Remember, he does come from the Saban and Belichick tree.
"When you learn one way and you’ve seen it be successful, I think that’s natural," he said of the influence those no-nonsense coaches had on him. "I own it. I was a son of a gun when I was younger."
As he has grown in the league and in his profession, however, he has learned to be himself.
"You learn as you go how you communicate with players," Daboll added. "There is mutual respect in this business. As a leader, you have to have tough conversations, truthful conversations, and each situation is a little bit different."
He recalled one of his first practices as a new defensive assistant — yes, he started out on defense — with the Patriots in 2000. He was fresh off a two-year stint as a graduate assistant for Saban at Michigan State and looking to impress his new boss, Belichick.
Something someone did in a drill wasn’t done to the standard required. The details were more forgettable than the fallout.
"I go off, I start ripping him," Daboll said. "Willie McGinest was like: ‘Hey, little guy. Relax.’ "
Nearly a quarter-century after that encounter, Daboll is a head coach in the NFL. He’s learned to relax and to be himself. He’s found out that faking his way through meetings or news conferences only distances those whom he’s trying to reach: players, fans, owners with whom he is interviewing.
Monday provided as clear and true a glimpse of Daboll as he could have provided. There certainly wasn’t a need for his wife to leave him a voicemail telling him otherwise.
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.
