CLEVELAND — It wasn’t Brian Daboll who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
But on Sunday at Huntington Bank Stadium against the Browns, Daboll confronts an old familiar fork in the road that has led to too many dead ends for recent Giants teams and regimes.
One bad turn deserves another on the Road to Oblivion.
A Woe-and-3 start would set Daboll and the Giants up for a doomsday scenario Thursday night when the Cowboys come barging into what would be a seething MetLife Stadium … if not taunting Jerry World East.
John Mara has seen 0-2, knows what 0-2 feels like, knows where 0-2 can lead.
He knows better than most that it can get late early around here.
He has seen 0-2 under Tom Coughlin. He has seen 0-2 under Ben McAdoo, under Pat Shurmur, under Joe Judge. And now, he has seen 0-2 under Brian Daboll.
McAdoo, Shurmur and Judge didn’t make it to a third season. Daboll has.
Mara wasn’t ready to offer Daboll an extension after the Giants’ 2-0 start in 2022, and he isn’t ready to start drawing up a short list of coaching candidates for 2025 after 0-2 in 2024. Nor should he be. Not after two weeks.
But for the you-are-what-your-record-says-you-are aficionados, Daboll has lost 13 of his past 19 games, and his rookie Coach of the Year honors seem like a distant memory.
“I expect us to take a big step forward,” Mara said in August.
He’s still waiting for a first step forward.
Daboll doesn’t need to be Coach of the Year on Sunday. He needs to be Coach of the Day.
Be better than Kevin Stefanski. Field a motivated, disciplined, fundamentally sound team that refuses to lose.
Otherwise, that’s how a hot seat can become an inferno.
This is hardly the start Mara envisioned to the franchise’s 100th anniversary season: 0-2 again … against Sam Darnold and rookie Jayden Daniels. An 0-3 start against Darnold and Daniels and the ghost of Deshaun Watson, with $60 million man Dak Prescott looming, would signal to the fan base that the Big Blue sky is once again falling.
At least against Myles Garrett and this elite Browns defense, Daboll will have Greg Joseph available to kick PATs or field goal, so Daniel Jones won’t have the burden of getting the ball into the end zone at every turn.
There is no way that Browns defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz or cornerback Denzel Ward will allow Malik Nabers 18 targets, so Daboll will need a more creative and diversified plan.
You don’t kick your team when it’s down, so this is what Daboll assured his players this week:
“We have all the ingredients we need.”
His predecessors tried desperately to stir the pot and bring their 0-2 Giants to a boil:
Coughlin in 2013:
“I understand how the players feel. We’re 0-2 and we’ve been 0-2 before, we dug our heels in before. When we did that it was all about ‘team.’ But our performance has to be better.”
Coughlin in 2014:
“I believe! I’m a believer! Put me up at the top, OK? Blame me for the problems, put me at the top, as far as getting this thing done. And I think they can go do it.”
Coughlin in 2015:
“We’ll continue to be positive, and we’ll continue to utilize our meeting time with positive reinforcements. Sooner or later, we just have to settle down and play the way we’re capable of playing when the game is on the line.”
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McAdoo in 2017:
“Yeah, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again. That’s insanity. It’s not working. So we are going to look to make some changes this week, like we did last week.
“Maybe it will be a little more drastic this week, to use your word. If that means me giving up play-calling duties, that’s something we will look at, that we’ll talk about. For personnel, jobs are won in this league, they are not given away. So somebody’s got to win a job or take a job to get a job.”
Shurmur in 2018:
“We look at everything all the time. I think what’s important is we stay the course, get the players that we have playing better, and try to make more plays to do what’s necessary to win the game.”
Shurmur in 2019, before he benched Eli Manning for Jones:
“I think we’ve got to go back and look at how our team played, and we’ve got to go back and take steps to get better in all areas. I don’t think that’s a conversation for right now.”
Judge in 2020:
“One thing we have to keep in mind is the NFL is a league of extremes. Week by week, someone is the best team in the league and someone is the worst. We just have to stay on our course of having daily improvement, which leads to weekly improvement which hopefully make us a better team by the end of the season. That’s our goal.”
Judge in 2021:
“I think it’s important we talk about the process. Regardless of the outcome, you’ve got to come in and really view it objectively, understanding what do we have to correct and what do we do well enough to go ahead and build on?’’
Nightmare scenario for Brian Daboll:
Déjà vu all over again.
