Jobs on the line for Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen, and more ‘things I think’ before Giants-Cowboys

Could a bad showing on Thursday be the end for Daboll?

If the New York Giants get embarrassed by the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday in similar fashion to the way they were embarrassed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, it is not hard to imagine Brian Daboll not being the head coach when the Giants host the New Orleans Saints in Week 14. Maybe GM Joe Schoen would get shown the door with him.

Thing is, it’s not hard to imagine the Giants — who have made a specialty of embarrassing themselves in front of national TV audiences in recent years — doing just that. The Giants showed most of the time in the first 10 games that they are better than the way they played on Sunday. If that is the best they can muster, though, it is certainly not good enough.

The 2-9 Giants are a mess.

• They will likely be on their third quarterback in three weeks, now perhaps forced by injury to start a player in Drew Lock they bypassed on Sunday for an undrafted free agent who might have only been playing because of his popularity with the team’s fan base.
• They come off a humiliating effort after which players called the performance “soft,” questioned the effort of teammates, called out the head coach and have spent the week explaining or backpedaling from those remarks.
• It is clear from what Daboll and many of the players have said that they don’t know how to explain what has happened as the Giants have lost six straight, or how to fix it.
• They just watched the quarterback they couldn’t win with or get to play to an acceptable standard sign with a 9-2 Super Bowl contender. If DeVito can’t play Thursday, Tim Boyle is one snap away from being the Giants’ quarterback.
• They have watched two players they decided they did not want to pay — Saquon Barkley and Xavier McKinney — embarrass them by having career seasons.
• The substitute left tackle who used to be the right tackle won’t play Thursday because of injury.
• One of the team’s best pass rushers just went on IR.

The list could go on.

I do expect the Giants to play with more effort on Thursday afternoon. Players were legitimately embarrassed by the performance they produced on Sunday, and I expect them to play hard enough not to repeat it.

That might be enough to earn Daboll — and by extension, Schoen — a stay of execution. Would it be enough to allow them an opportunity to stick around beyond the end of this season?

I still don’t believe ownership wants to blow everything up and start over. Again. I certainly believe John Mara and Steve Tisch don’t want to do anything during the season. I think they are looking/hoping/praying for reasons not to. It is entirely possible, though, that we are almost at the point where the product is indefensible and there won’t be any choice.

The Giants started the Schoen/Daboll era 7-2. Since that time they have gone 10-25-1 in regular season games, and the quality of the product seems to be getting worse.

If Daboll, in particular, is going to stay, the Giants need to play with effort. They need to get the ball to Malik Nabers. They need to figure out how to score points. They need to hold together as team. They need to look like they have some idea how to play defense. They need to show some signs of improvement over the season’s final few weeks.

Bottom line is this is not where the Giants should be in Year 3 of a build. The worse it gets the more it becomes likely that Daboll and Schoen pay for the regression — and the embarrassment — with their jobs.

Effort or execution?

When a team does not give complete effort or simply does not look committed to or interested in putting their best product on the field that is damning for a head coach. Whether it was the case or not, that is what Sunday looked like for the Giants against the Buccaneers.

Daboll and the players spent Monday and Tuesday saying the film did not show lack of effort. Rather, it showed lack of execution. Lack of technique.

At this point, 12 weeks into a season, isn’t that just as bad for a head coach and his staff?

Two-thirds of the way through the season, shouldn’t players know the plays and understand their assignments? Shouldn’t they know who to block? What gaps they are supposed to fill against the run? How they are supposed to run certain routes? Where they are supposed to be in zone coverages? Shouldn’t they be able to utilize proper blocking and tackling technique?

Yes, the Giants are one of the youngest teams in the league. As such, some mistakes are going to happen. These, though, are professional athletes. The best in the world at what they do. They should be able to master the basic techniques required for the plays and schemes being run.

Is it the coaching? Is it the players? Maybe it is some combination of both.

Jon Runyan said this week that the team has been trying to figure out how to fix it for “this past month plus.”

If players aren’t learning, maybe the Giants don’t have the right coaches. Or, maybe they don’t have the right players. Here is something Runyan said that, to me, is an indication that in at least some cases you have to blame the players:

“I’m not trying to call anybody out, but for certain people, you can only do so much for them,” Runyan said. “There comes a point where the execution or the detail isn’t there. Whether that is on offense or defense or special teams, I don’t know.

“We try to take care of our own house, especially on the offense side of the ball. Leave defense up to what defense is. We can only do so much as offensive linemen, speaking from our perspective. Everybody has to take ownership of their position group and as a whole, the offensive and defensive unit.”

If it is the coaches, that is an indictment of Daboll and the position coaches who work for him. If it’s the players, that’s an indictment of the GM who acquired them.

As I said, it is probably a little of both. When you are 10-25-1 over two-plus years, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Decisions, decisions

When we did our position-by-position look at the Giants during the bye week, we covered in detail most of the major decisions made by Schoen during his time as GM.

Over the past two years, I think you can make the case that most major decisions Schoen and the Giants have made has been based on solid, defensible reasoning, data, and intentions. Those include the signing and releasing of Daniel Jones, the handling of Saquon Barkley, not getting into a bidding war in free agency for Xavier McKinney, trading Leonard Williams, trading for Brian Burns, and drafting Malik Nabers instead of a quarterback in the first round last April.

Each of those decisions included high degrees of risk. Many of them — you know which ones — are blowing up spectacularly on the GM. Even if you can argue many of them were the right decisions, and I believe most if not all of them were, the degree to which many of them are causing the Giants embarrassment is extraordinary.

Schoen’s misses in his first two drafts, especially his inability to maximize his first-round picks, is proving costly. As wonderful a player as Nabers is, if J.J. McCarthy (the likely choice at No. 6 had the Giants gone quarterback) turns out to be a terrific pro and the Giants don’t solve their quarterback issue soon, that decision won’t look like a good one, either.

He’s a Viking

Yes, I am talking about Daniel Jones. I love the Minnesota Vikings as a landing spot for Jones.

This is what Louis Riddick said on ‘Threads’. Yes, Threads:

Smart move Daniel Jones.

Kevin O’Connell is exactly what you need. He will provide you answers. Well done.

I agree.

Jones has chosen a very good team with an excellent offensive-minded head coach. If Jones benefits from being around O’Connell and looks like a better quarterback the next time he gets a reach chance, that is another poor reflection on Daboll, a supposed quarterback-whisperer.

By the way, could you imagine this scenario:

Vikings current starter Sam Darnold signs with the Giants in free agency, Jones stays in Minnesota as the bridge quarterback for McCarthy, and Jones actually outperforms Darnold in 2025.

Somehow, that would be typical of the way things have gone for the Giants in recent years.

About Shedeur

Everybody has an opinion about Shedeur Sanders and whether or not he would be the right quarterback for the Giants to build around. When Schoen was seen at a Colorado practice this week, everybody had something to say.

Right now, I am not sold. I am concerned about what you hear about entitlement and about seeing things like the quarterback shoving an official. I will, though, keep an open mind.

Maybe some attitude, like what Nabers is showing, is what the Giants need. I want to study Sanders. I want to talk to people who know far more about quarterbacks than I do, and who have far more ability to talk to Sanders and/or people close to him than I ever will.

I will trust what the people I trust to evaluate/judge prospects tell me.