Can Brian Daboll succeed where others have failed with Russell Wilson?

New York Giants fans, as well as the media, have understandably focused much of their attention on the Giants’ rookie quarterback, Jaxson Dart. In a way, though, that’s odd because the Giants also brought in veteran quarterback Russell Wilson, who has a Super Bowl ring, almost had another, is a good bet to make the Hall of Fame, and is likely to be the starting QB in Game 1 this year.

If you doubt Wilson’s HOF chances, take a look at the Pro Football Reference Hall of Fame Monitor. This formula weighs a variety of factors that they have concluded are most predictive of who will (not who should) get into the HOF based on the habits of HOF voters:

Courtesy of Pro Football Reference

Wilson’s HOF Monitor value is already higher than 11 HOF quarterbacks (HOFers are indicated in boldface; the chart only shows the first three whose HOF Monitor is lower than Wilson’s) and higher than Eli Manning’s.

The funny thing about Wilson, though, is that for a future HOFer, he generates very little excitement or respect among fans and football analysts. The reason, of course, is that he appears to be well into the downside of his career. Wilson was traded by Seattle to Denver, lasted only two seasons, was traded to Pittsburgh, and the Steelers moved on after just one season. The Giants got him for one year and $10.5 million. It’s not a ringing endorsement.

Off-field issues about Wilson’s personality and disagreements with his coaches have been written about quite a bit. Let’s (mostly) forget about the former and stick to the football aspect. Here’s the question I’d like to pose: Has Russell Wilson ever had a head coach who thought he was or could be a great quarterback?

Wilson was a third-round pick in the 2012 NFL Draft, presumably because at 5-foot-11 it was thought he couldn’t thrive in the NFL. Wilson was chosen after No. 1 pick Andrew Luck and No. 2 pick Robert Griffin III, but also behind No. 8 Ryan Tannehill, No. 22 Brandon Weeden, and No. 57 Brock Osweiler.

Wilson’s head coach in Seattle, Pete Carroll, had a run-first mentality in designing his offense, as we will show shortly. You can’t blame him with Marshawn Lynch running the ball in the early part of Wilson’s career. The Seahawks won a Super Bowl playing offense that way and relying on their ‘Legion of Boom’ defense to stifle the opponent in 2013. They almost won a second in 2014, but didn’t because Carroll called for a pass rather than a handoff to Lynch on fourth down near the goal line in the closing seconds.

Wilson saw things differently. In an NFL that was increasingly favoring the pass over the run, he thought he was capable of carrying the offense with his arm. Wilson has always been conscious of his legacy. According to ESPN’s reporting, Wilson wanted to win an MVP award, and the Seahawks’ coaching staff felt that it affected his decision-making on the field. After Lynch left the Seahawks in 2016, though, Carroll relented and decided to lean on Wilson more than he had.

You can see this in the ratio of pass attempts to rushing attempts for each of Wilson’s seasons, plotted below against the ratio of passing yards to rushing yards:

Ever since the New England Patriots revolutionized NFL offense in 2007, passing has started to dominate, in both attempts and in yards. The plot above shows, though, that in Seattle’s Super Bowl seasons with Wilson (2013 and 2014), they actually ran slightly more often than they passed. With Lynch gone in 2016, though, Carroll designed the offense around Wilson’s arm. It paid off in the stats, with Seattle’s passing yards being more than 2.5 times their rushing yards. The team, though, never made it past the Divisional Round of the playoffs, and Carroll returned to his run-first mentality in 2018 and 2019, now with Brian Schottenheimer on board as offensive coordinator.

Wilson continued to lobby for a more pass-centric offense (“Let Russ Cook”), Carroll relented and once again emphasized the passing game in 2020, but to no avail in the win-loss column, and after 2021 Wilson was gone. Wilson started strong in 2020 but became susceptible to turnovers, with 10 in four games, as Seattle lost three of four. The breaking point may have been this moment against the Rams, as reported by ESPN:

Trailing by a touchdown, he scrambled to his right and had a massive swath of empty turf in front of him. He bypassed the rushing yards, uncorking a deep heave back across the field that was picked off in the end zone.

“What are we doing here?” one source in the Seahawks’ front office remembers thinking at the time. “Are we trying to win games or are we trying to win MVP?”

With Sean Payton in Denver in 2023, Wilson was allowed to pass more than he had been in most of his Seattle seasons but not as much as he did in 2020 or 2016. Wilson’s tendency to flee the pocket and pass up short gains for moon balls downfield, combined with his decreased mobility with age, put him in Payton’s doghouse and sent him packing to Pittsburgh. As reported by The Athletic:

Payton wants to play a certain way. He wants a quarterback who can routinely deliver the ball in the rhythm of his offense. Second acts, in his view, can’t be the first plan.

With a dangerous deep ball threat in George Pickens, Wilson might have been expected to succeed. Unfortunately the Steelers’ offensive coordinator, Arthur Smith, has a run-first philosophy. Only four NFL teams ran the ball more than they passed it last season. Two of them, the Eagles and the Ravens, are no surprise given their elite running backs, elite offensive lines, and dangerous running quarterbacks. The third was Pittsburgh, which did not have the first two things and did not have the third when the aging Wilson started for them:

Data from Pro Football Reference

(These plots are season totals. Justin Fields, the quintessential running quarterback, started the first six games, so the data point in the plot for Pittsburgh is a combination of games that both started.)

Wilson actually got off to a good start in Pittsburgh when he replaced Fields. Per The Athletic:

The QB’s veteran presence rallied a young (and sometimes immature) group of offensive players. His experience allowed the offense to change plays more fluidly at the line of scrimmage. And, more than anything, his trademark moonball unlocked the outsized potential of star receiver George Pickens.

That didn’t last, though:

Sacks — an issue for Wilson as his mobility has declined in recent years — became problematic. He was dropped 3.5 times per game from Week 15 to 18 and finished with 33 this season, the fourth-most in the NFL since he became the starter in Week 7.

The deep shots stopped connecting, as Pickens sat out two of the four losses and teams aggressively game planned to take away the main source of offense in a boom-or-bust system. Through Wilson’s first seven starts, he completed 17 of 33 (51.5 percent) pass attempts that traveled 20-plus yards downfield, with four touchdowns. During the losing streak, he completed just 4 of 12 (33.3 percent) such passes with no touchdowns. Shots weren’t there, and when they were, they didn’t find their mark (or were dropped).

Wilson’s 560 career sacks are the fourth highest of any QB in NFL history. Some of that is on the poor offensive lines Wilson has often played behind (Seattle’s pass blocking was routinely in the bottom 10 in Pro Football Focus’ pass blocking grades during his time there), but some of it has been Wilson’s own fault because of his insistence on creating big plays.

Where does this leave things as the Giants approach their 2025 season with Wilson the presumed starter?

You can see in the plot above that the Giants were not a run-first team in 2024 despite the subpar QB play they got in most of their games. Only six teams had a higher pass/run attempt ratio, though all six had a much higher pass/run yards ratio. Part of that is probably because the Giants’ offensive line wasn’t very good at run blocking, and they were often behind in games and had to try to pass to catch up. With less production when they did pass, the offense was unproductive.

That may not be the only reason the Giants passed so much, though. Giants head coach Brian Daboll likes the passing game. We can see this from his history as offensive coordinator in Buffalo and from his years as Giants’ head coach:

Data from Pro Football Reference

Even in Josh Allen’s rookie year (2018), when he was terrible, the Bills passed the ball slightly more often than they ran it (and the data point in the plot above includes games started by the even-worse Nathan Peterman). 2019 was pretty much the same, and then things exploded in 2020 with the addition of Stefon Diggs and Allen’s maturation as a passer. The Bills passed almost 50% more often than they ran and had almost three times as many passing yards as running yards. 2021 wasn’t quite as impressive in results but similar in pass/run ratio.

Daboll’s first year with the Giants (2022) looked a lot like the early Josh Allen years with an almost 1:1 pass/run ratio, and 2023 looked pretty similar despite the merry-go-round at the QB position. In 2024, though, things began to change in the direction of more passing, with the results looking similar (in ratio though not in absolute yards gained) to Josh Allen’s 2021 season.

You can’t separate the cart from the horse when interpreting these statistics, because a quarterback needs receivers to throw to. Allen noticeably improved from 2019 to 2020, but having Diggs certainly helped get those passing yard numbers up. Likewise, it’s a good guess that the presence of Malik Nabers in 2024 accounted for the uptick in the pass/run ratio in both attempts and yards.

I suggest that the chart above shows us what Daboll wants to do offensively: When he has the people to do it, he likes to pass the ball, but when he doesn’t he adapts to what he has. The interesting thing is that his chart is quite similar to the chart of Russell Wilson’s career. The reasons are different, though. Daboll took the reins off Josh Allen once he gained confidence in his throwing and knew he had someone to throw to. Wilson’s head coaches and coordinators have had stronger views of the offense they wanted to run and tried to get Wilson to work within their system.

The question is: By the end of training camp, will Daboll have confidence in Wilson? That depends in part on Daboll’s flexibility, and in part on Wilson’s. Daboll’s philosophy seems to be to design an offense that best exploits a quarterback’s strengths rather than to insist on one specific way of attacking a defense. He looks for input from players on what they like. What Wilson likes is to break the pocket, with or without pressure, hold the ball, and look for a man downfield. His downfall with all his previous coaches was insisting on doing that even when it wasn’t necessary or advisable. Even last season, Wilson was excellent on both deep and intermediate throws, just not on the short stuff:

Courtesy of Pro Football Focus

You’d anticipate that Daboll and Mike Kafka (if he’s still involved in designing the offense) will adapt to Wilson’s proclivities and design route combinations (e.g., sail concepts) with both deep and intermediate options on the same side of the field plus a shallow outlet to help him make quicker decisions than his recent history suggests he’s been doing. If so, and if Wilson learns a lesson from his recent failures with three different teams, the Giants’ offense could be dynamic in 2025. If not, then we can expect weekly questions about whether Jaxson Dart is almost ready to get onto the field.