Giants' offense a merger of Kansas City, Buffalo schemes
Giants head coach Brian Daboll talks to quarterback Daniel Jones during training camp at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center in East Rutherford, N.J., on Monday. Credit: Brad Penner
Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes and Tyreek Hill and Stefon Diggs have never played for the Giants, but there were times this spring — and even earlier in this training camp — when they were so omnipresent in just about everything the actual Giants did that it felt as if they were right there in the meeting rooms with the team.
As the new coaching staff installed the new offense, a system that merged the ones Brian Daboll brought with him from Buffalo and Mike Kafka brought from Kansas City, the best examples of what they wanted to accomplish often came from video archives of their former teams.
So the Giants would watch the Bills and Kansas City play and try to imagine how it might look when they took those same concepts onto the field. They had to visualize themselves running those routes, making those reads, taking those handoffs that had helped make Buffalo and Kansas City title contenders (and a recent Super Bowl victor) during the last few years.
Those images are gone now. No longer does the screen at the front of the room flicker with the red or white helmets that ran those plays so adroitly. These days, when the Giants want to call up the clip of a play in their arsenal, they are able to see it performed by themselves.
“At this point, we’ve run pretty much everything in the system, so we have those clips to look back on to watch and study mostly,” Daniel Jones said this past week. “We’re mostly watching our own stuff.”
That may not sound like a tremendous step forward, but it is. It’s a signal that the merger of the two offensive playbooks is just about complete. It means that the schemes the Giants are running now are no longer labeled Buffalo plays or Kansas City plays.
They are Giants plays. This is starting to become the Giants’ offense.
Though that kind of progress probably won’t be visible in Sunday night’s preseason game against the Bengals, it is taking shape in practices and workouts and meeting rooms on a daily basis. The coaching staff will be focused Sunday on running bland calls bent more toward evaluating their own talent rather than beating someone else’s. Also, who knows if Jones or Saquon Barkley or any of the other starting skill position players will be on the field, given an offensive line that is being held together with bungee cords and duct tape.
“That’s what we’re working on right now,” said Kafka, the offensive coordinator. “[We’re] working on what we are going to do with our players. Put them in the best spot. Continue to evaluate how these guys fit within that offense and then be flexible as a staff to understand, all right, this might not be the best look or the best spot for this player but who is the best person for that spot? Who is the best person to put on this route or this concept or this run scheme?”
No one can say for certain how long the gestation period will be for this Buffalo and Kansas City genetic offspring that will at some point grow into the Giants’ offense . . . at least theoretically.
“I don’t think there is a timetable on that,” Kafka said. “When we get to Week 1 down the road, that’s when I think you want to be peaking as an offense, peaking as a team, and all that. Right now, we are taking it a day at a time, still working through with our players, being patient with them.”
For the players, though, there has been a seismic shift in perception. In the past couple of weeks, Jones has at least been able to take ownership of the offense, even if not every day or down is perfect. They no longer are Allen’s passes or Mahomes’ RPOs that Jones is emulating; they are, for better or worse, his own.
Same for Barkley and Wan’Dale Robinson and all the others who had to sift through months of watching other teams play at a high level but no longer are limited to visualizing themselves as part of that world.
“I think that’s already happened and is happening,” Jones said of the birth of a new Giants offense. “I think that’s a constant process, though. You’re growing in that and learning what we do best, learning what our guys can do and want to do, which I think is a big thing. I don’t think that ever stops.
“I think it is our system,” he added. “I think we’ve made a lot of those changes, we’ve learned a lot through camp, and we’ll continue to do so.”
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.
More Giants
