New Giants coach Brian Daboll figures to be significantly better than Joe Judge
Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll attends warmups before an NFL divisional playoff game against Kansas City on Jan. 23, 2022, in Kansas City, Mo. Credit: AP/Reed Hoffmann
He built an impressive resume as an NFL assistant coach, working for the greatest NFL coach and best college coach of all time. He has been part of Super Bowl-winning teams and national championship teams, a man whose apprenticeships with Bill Belichick and Nick Saban have prepared him for this uniquely challenging moment.
Joe Judge?
Well, not this time.
This time the Giants hired a head coach whose background is far more likely to result in a long-awaited turnaround than that of Judge.
Judge’s work under Belichick and Saban was a huge draw for Giants co-owner John Mara and Steve Tisch in 2020, but his job performance fell far short of expectations in a failed two-year run.
This time Brian Daboll brings the kind of fully formed background and well-earned success as a longtime offensive coordinator that Judge simply didn’t have.
A special teams coach by trade, Judge talked a good game, promising to deliver a team Giants fans could be proud of — a tough, hard-working group that would compete from start to finish.
Mara and Tisch thought they’d found their own version of Belichick, but Judge won only 10 games in two years and put out such an inferior product in the second half of this season that the Giants had no choice but to wipe the slate clean.
In came Joe Schoen as general manager and with him came Daboll, whose work with Josh Allen over the last four years helped make the Bills a championship-caliber team that came within 13 agonizing seconds of beating Kansas City in last week’s thrilling divisional-round matchup.
Daboll, 46, has paid the kind of dues that you want to see in a head coach. He worked his way up as a volunteer assistant at William & Mary, where he first met Bills coach Sean McDermott, and then had stints with Saban at Michigan State and Alabama. He was with Belichick in New England, with the Jets a couple of years as quarterbacks coach and with Buffalo, where he built one of the NFL’s best offenses.
Daboll is a forward-thinking coach who comes to a team desperate to build an offense that can be better than the inept group the Giants have had the last two years. It won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees that he can transform Daniel Jones into a highly functional quarterback. At this point, the Giants would settle for making Jones a consistently solid player, not someone who labors to move his team and whose unfamiliarity with the end zone has been a theme through much of his career.
And let’s get this out of the way right now: There is zero chance Jones will turn into a reasonable facsimile of Allen.
Daboll helped mold Allen from a big-armed and talented but raw player out of Wyoming into one of the league’s top five quarterbacks. Maybe even top three. Bills assistant GM Schoen, who saw Daboll’s work up close, was impressed by his teaching ability, which is really what coaching comes down to.
"That’s why all of us do this," Daboll said after the Giants announced his hiring late Friday afternoon. "To teach, to be successful, to develop talent and to win. I have a pretty good idea where our fan base’s feelings are right now, and I get it. I promise we will work our tails off to put a team on the field that you will be proud to support and give us the result we all want."
The fan base is in a bad way after 10 years of mostly brutal football. The Giants were the worst team in football in 2021 and have been to the playoffs only once since Eli Manning and Tom Coughlin hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy after the 2011 season. They are bereft of talent thanks to the failed tenure of GM Dave Gettleman, and Schoen’s background leads you to believe he can and will be demonstrably better than his predecessor.
He now gets to work with a coach he knows well, a man he believes he can build a partnership like the one shared by Bills GM Brandon Beane and McDermott, who have transformed Buffalo from a perennial loser into a Super Bowl contender.
There’s no assurance Schoen and Daboll can replicate that success with the Giants. But there is a reasonable expectation that they can end this reign of embarrassment.
Bob Glauber retired in 2022 after covering the NFL for nearly 40 years. He was selected in 2021 for the Bill Nunn Career Achievement Award by the Pro Football Writers of America, and is a three-time winner of the New York State Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. President of the PFWA for the 2018-20 seasons, he is the author of “The Forgotten First” and “Guts and Genius.”
