The Greater New York Football Playing Area has enjoyed the invigorating sensation of firing a coach nearly every year for the last decade and change—2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2024—which, for all the other things it suggests about the quality of NFL football produced in that region, also suggested that the sense Giants coach Brian Daboll was overdue for his pink slip was very definitely, well, over-overdue. But you know what they say: You blow one 10-point second-half lead, you're unlucky, but you blow four and you might get to be unlucky somewhere else, while working for someone else.
That fourth blown lead was the most immediate, if far from the only, reason that ownership decided it had seen enough and sent Daboll to the knackers yard Monday. Daboll's final record was a grisly but appealingly neat-looking 20-40-1, and was marked with not only disrespected late leads but unseemly temper tantrums, unauthorized tent-peeking, a desperation-fueled and fairly cavalier view of his shiny new quarterback's health, and general don't-wear-a-beard-and-shave-your-head fashion offenses. Since Tom Coughlin resigned the post in 2015 and the Giants' carousel de la commode began, Daboll's .336 winning percentage is the best by a Giants coach since the year and change given over to the Ben McAdoo experiment. The Jets may be the reigning regional and national punchline, but the Giants are just a punching bag in an old gym—it works well enough to keep punching it, but there is better equipment to be found elsewhere. It has never been a bad choice to keep your hopes minimal with this bunch; whatever fan expectations were of Daboll, he pretty much met them.
Rumors had been floating that owner John Mara had reached critical mass with Daboll even before the team duffed away another shot at victory in Chicago on Sunday. When the coach was brought back for 2025, Mara already sounded like he needed to be guided off the ledge from which he wanted to throw Daboll, saying "(this) better not take too long because I’ve just about run out of patience.” And we all know that sentence always ends.
The Giants are treated with a gravity their results do not particularly warrant, because they are in New York and a founding member of the NFL—sort of like the Knicks, but with a shorter hunt to find the good old days. They have won two Super Bowls since Bill Parcells quit in 1990, both under the supervision of the relentlessly bubbly Coughlin, but the last decade has been pretty much a washout. The last fired Giants coach to get another head coaching job anywhere else was Dan Reeves, and that was almost three decades ago. Daboll got his first Giants team into the playoffs, which not only made him a genius but also which probably bought him not only 2025 but 2024 as well. But the reason he got the job—bland, failed football, overseen by a man with the sort of bluff and coachly vibe that the Maras favor—is also the reason he lost it. The Giants were as he found them, and as he left them.
The interim coach is the aptly surnamed Mike Kafka, the current offensive coordinator and someone who has been hot-listed as a head coaching candidate for years now. Like most new guys, he is inheriting a dispirited team with a cranky owner and a general manager with one foot hovering over the elevator shaft. Both the odds and his last name's literary associations suggest Kafka will be swamped by forces greater than him; in this case, those can be summed up as "who and what the Giants are." But no NFL job ever goes unfilled for long, no matter how impossible the situation—see the Raiders for confirmation.
As for Daboll, he will return from whence he came, which is to the ranks of the NFL's high-powered assistants. At some point the Giants will play a primetime game against Daboll's new employer, and Cris Collinsworth will cite his brilliance 60 or 70 times in a three-hour window. He will do this not because Daboll's strategic mastery demands it, but because that's what you do as a broadcaster when a coach has helped prep you and your producer for the game. History suggests Daboll won't run his own shop again, but that history hated him the day he took the job. John Mara's patience may be short, but his vision has always been thus, which is why the Giants will be the Giants long after Brian Daboll is but a glowering memory trying to poke his head into the medical tent.
