After clinching their first playoff berth in seven years Sunday, the Giants dumped sports drink all over the man who deserves to win the NFL Coach of the Year award. No one has done more with less than Brian Daboll in 2022. No one hired in these last few cycles has toiled on the unappreciated rungs of the coaching ladder for as long before being pegged as a guru or a genius worthy of a serious look.
But this hiring took a monumental effort we don’t often consider when it comes to the identification of successful football coaches. It required the Giants to bet against themselves, to look past a formula that had made them one of the most successful modern franchises and to gut an operation that comfortably thrived on a familial atmosphere. We have written about this before, but on a day like Sunday, it takes on a greater importance. The Giants hadn’t brought real, fresh, unfamiliar blood into their organization since the late 1970s, when they hired legendary general manager George Young. From there, each subsequent hire was in some way inspired by the correct choices before it. Bill Parcells eventually gave way to Dan Reeves, the 1993 coach of the year; who gave way to Jim Fassel, the ’97 coach of the year, who made it to Super Bowl XXXV; who gave way to Tom Coughlin, who won Super Bowls XLII and XLVI. All of those hirings were made either by Young or one of his associates.
No one would have blamed the Giants if they’d continued to operate like the thriving family business they were, even when Ben McAdoo gave way to Pat Shurmur, who gave way to Joe Judge.
Somewhere along the way, though, the idea came not to take a coach and teach him the Giant Way, but to allow a new Giant Way to emerge naturally. In came Daboll and GM Joe Schoen from Buffalo, offensive coordinator Mike Kafka from Kansas City and defensive coordinator Don Martindale from Baltimore. From all of those places, the Giants got a sense of what they were missing out on—how other successful teams operate and how to find success in ways you may not have considered. This wasn’t quite Ford Motor Company going electric, but it wasn’t insignificant, either.
Now, let’s take a look at the opposing sideline from Sunday’s 38–10 demolition of the Colts.
After losing their fifth straight game, after starting their third different quarterback, after again being shut down in the fourth quarter, Indianapolis had to return home on a plane paid for by a man who evidently still thinks this experiment is a good idea. Just a week ago, Jim Irsay told ESPN in an interview that he considered interim Jeff Saturday a strong candidate for the full-time job. NFL Network reported via sources informed of the situation that Irsay still felt that way as late as Sunday morning.
This hiring also took a monumental effort. It took Irsay’s phoning a friend and ESPN analyst and saying “please?” It took wiping out a staff in suspicious order and tinkering with the ends of two exceptional quarterbacking careers in Matt Ryan and Nick Foles. In almost the complete opposite instinct that brought Daboll to the Giants, the Colts tripled down on their most unreliable gut instincts and are now circling the drain. They are not nearly bad enough to get the quarterback who could fix all of this at the top of the draft (the Texans seem determined to hold onto that distinction) and not nearly good enough to stop us from pointing and laughing.
Allow this to be a lesson to us all about our personal comfort zones and what might really make us better. Chances are, many of us made a New Year’s resolution around busting one of these very same mental processes. One could argue that the Colts had a better roster going into this season than their counterparts Sunday. They had more stable and quantifiable resources. They had higher hopes. But they—Irsay, really—decided that what was right for the franchise was his own personal idea of what a coaching maverick might be. Sure, this has brought him Jim Caldwell and Tony Dungy in the past. It also helped him arrive at Frank Reich, whom, we will likely see, is a legitimate head coaching candidate for other teams in 2023.
But it also brought them here, to this place, where they were brushing elbows with a man soaking wet and overjoyed. With a team that was on the way to the playoffs, with an owner who, I’ll bet, is enjoying every minute of this ride, recognizing how it outweighs the slight discomfort he endured to go against his instincts in the first place.
