Tom Rock: Giants, with QB Jaxson Dart and coach John Harbaugh, look to follow recent blueprint for success
Giants coach John Harbaugh and quarterback Jaxson Dart. Credit: Noah K. Murray; Jim McIsaac
These NFL playoffs have taught us two things.
The first is that if a team can pair the right coach with the right quarterback, it can turn its fortunes around and do so very quickly.
Two of the four teams vying this weekend for a trip to the Super Bowl have reached this point with a second-year quarterback (although only the Patriots with Drake Maye still have one after the Broncos’ Bo Nix suffered a fractured ankle last week). A third has a second-year head coach with a new quarterback (Sam Darnold). The fourth has a combination that already won a championship in their first season together.
Only the Rams were a playoff team as of the end of the 2023 season, having gotten in as a wild card. Now, two years later, they are the league’s final four.
And the most exciting team in the postseason, the recently eliminated Bears, who gave us a series of comebacks and one of the most memorable January plays in NFL history before departing the stage, had a second-year quarterback (Caleb Williams) and a new head coach, too.
The second lesson? There is no reason the Giants shouldn’t be among them and potentially getting ready to play a game at this very point next year.
If the NFL really is a copycat league, the Giants are following the most recent blueprint for success. They already were in a good spot with Jaxson Dart coming off his impressive rookie season, and now they have fortified that asset with the addition of John Harbaugh as their new head coach. It’s the kind of 1-2 punch that should pay immediate benefits.
“It’s probably something that maybe I should take a look at,” Harbaugh said coyly at his introductory news conference this week, referring to the many worst-to-firsts around the sport of late, with teams such as the Jaguars and Panthers following roughly similar recipes. “We’ll do some kind of study. We’ve got all these analytics guys, so we’ll have them do a study on that.”
Don’t worry, John. They have. That’s why you are here.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of bandwidth or artificial intelligence to see the common denominators. Heck, as general manager Joe Schoen pointed out, the Giants already kind of did it once under his watch when they won a Wild Card game with rookie head coach Brian Daboll and Daniel Jones (although he always seems to conveniently forget that Saquon Barkley, not Jones, was the centerpiece of that offense and the heart of that team).
But Schoen also pointed out U-turns toward prosperity at other stops in his career, too.
“It’s crazy the amount of times I’ve been a part of a new head coach where you go to the playoffs,” he said noting his experiences in Miami with Tony Sparano in 2008 and Buffalo with Sean McDermott in 2017. “Just coming in with new energy, new leadership, a new coaching staff, and sometimes when the guys buy in and then you catch a little momentum early in the season, that can be contagious.”
This feels different from all of those, however. This is a proven head coach, not a first-timer like those others with whom Schoen worked. And these Giants not only have a very exciting roster — assuming Malik Nabers and Cam Skattebo can return from their injuries and join Dart on offense — but a very young one. All three of those players are younger than the quarterback who just led the University of Miami to the College Football Playoff championship game.
Add Andrew Thomas (when he is healthy and available) and a defense that includes a Pro Bowler (Brian Burns) and a finalist for Defensive Rookie of the Year (Abdul Carter) as two of their edge-rushing linebackers often miscast under the previous regime, and darned if these Giants don’t look like actual contenders.
So why did they win only four games this past season?
“It’s a league of tight margins,” Harbaugh said. “Everybody is really good. Nobody is as bad as you think. This is pro football. Everybody is right there.”
The Giants certainly were in a lot of their games. The list of contests they led late and should have won reads like the departures board at LaGuardia: Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans.
“So you have to work really hard, do all the little things to be as good of a team as you can be to give yourself a play in the margins,” Harbaugh said. “Let’s get ourselves to that point, let’s try to win all the little things to give ourselves a way to win in the fourth quarter.
“When you don’t have as many wins, you weren’t able to do that. If you look at their season, that’s what happened to the Giants.”
Harbaugh is here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
So enjoy these conference championship games, Giants fans. Watch and learn. And for the first time in a while, compare and daydream.
Chances are very good that whoever wins this coming Super Bowl will be blazing a trail for the 2026 Giants to try to follow.
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.
