Firing Shane Bowen will be Mike Kafka's easiest call with Giants; now comes the hard part
Giants interim head coach Mike Kafka at MetLife Stadium on Nov. 16, 2025. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Mike Kafka said he “made a tough decision” to fire Shane Bowen as defensive coordinator and replace him with outside linebackers coach Charlie Bullen on Monday.
But that was just Kafka being kind.
In reality, it was one of the easiest calls Kafka has had to make since taking over as interim head coach of the Giants two weeks ago. It may be one of the most clear-cut ones he’ll ever make. After the Giants blew a double-digit lead for the fifth time this season in their overtime loss in Detroit on Sunday, Bowen simply had to go.
Fourth-and-goal up by three late in the game? That’s a tough decision.
Firing Bowen? We don’t need analytical numbers crunchers to say this one made sense.
He already should have been gone, to be frank. He should not have been brought back after team president and CEO John Mara gave his remarks on the 2024 season and expressed his disgust over “watching teams go up and down the field on us.”
Changes — either on the staff or in overall philosophy of the unit — should have been made after the Giants lost their Week 2 game in Dallas. Bowen should have been shown the door after the Giants allowed 33 fourth-quarter points in Denver.
But coach Brian Daboll kept Bowen, and that loyalty played a big role in costing him his own job two weeks ago.
Kafka, two weeks into this new role, correctly determined that his own immediate future as a head coach could be tied to Bowen as well. So after losing two games in which the Giants led in the fourth quarter, and after having been the offensive coordinator watching as the defense frittered away all the leads he had given them before that, Kafka made the call.
Kafka had voiced his support for Bowen as recently as Sunday evening in the immediate aftermath of the loss to the Lions. By Monday morning, that confidence was gone. So was Bowen.
“I just had an opportunity to watch the tape, look back at a few weeks, watch a lot of the defense, watch a lot of what was going on, the communication, and I just felt like this was the right time to do it,” Kafka said. “When I got the job, I didn’t want to make a lot of rash decisions and jump to anything really quick. I wanted to have some time to sit back, evaluate, look at it and kind of figure out what the best thing to do was. I wanted to be calculated in how I handled it. I thought today was the right time.”
Perhaps it would have been better if management had made the call for him two weeks ago and fired Bowen along with Daboll. That would have given Kafka a chance to rejigger the entire operation at once. But that didn’t happen, so the Giants lost two more games.
Now that Kafka finally has reached the same conclusion that anyone with a social media account or the phone number to a call-in sports radio show had been voicing for weeks, it’s up to him and Bullen to fix things. They have five games remaining to salvage something from this wretched season.
How the Giants respond now will go a long way toward determining Kafka’s readiness for a future head-coaching opportunity, either here or elsewhere.
“We’re going to give Charlie the reins to make the corrections that he sees fit for the defense, whether it’s personnel, scheme, communication, calls,” Kafka said. “He’s going to work hand-in-hand with the whole defensive unit to make sure it’s his vision. Obviously, I’ll have my fingerprint on there as well and be there and try to be an asset for the group.”
As recently as two weeks ago, Kafka and Bullen barely knew each other beyond nodding when they passed each other in the hallway. They worked on opposite sides of the ball. Bullen joked that their biggest connection was that both originally are from Illinois.
Then Kafka became interim head coach and that relationship changed. It’s about to change a whole lot more now.
“We have a great plan,” Kafka said. “We had a great conversation this morning about what that would look like. That’s something we’re going to build in-house and build with the players together as a group and as a team.”
Can they do that in six weeks? With the same player personnel?
“Yeah,” Kafka said, confidently at first and then with the faint hint of a grin at the enormity of it, “we’re going to have to figure that out.”
That’s the tough part.
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.
