Giants are banking big on Brian Daboll’s nice-guy approach
The old manager of the New York Baseball Giants, Leo Durocher, would have had an interesting take on this latest New York Football Giants press conference. Brian Daboll was introduced as the franchise’s 20th head coach, and if Daboll is known for anything around the NFL beyond his work with Josh Allen, it is the undisputed fact that he is a nice guy.
Durocher once famously declared where nice guys finish in the standings. Hint: It isn’t first place in the NFC East.
But there was Daboll anyway Monday morning, pulling up to the Giants facility in a blue Ford pickup and hopping out in a dark suit that fit him a lot better than Ben McAdoo’s did. Bald and bearded and dying to get out of that suit and into some football sweats, Daboll came armed with good humor, self-deprecating tales from the coaching crypt and an eagerness to be a kindly next-door neighbor while he’s teaching Daniel Jones how to win games.
Daboll delivered a great story about leaving the Giants’ East Rutherford offices late Sunday night, craving some much-needed sleep in his nearby hotel, and somehow getting lost and ending up on the George Washington Bridge. He called his dear wife in a panic, and Beth was too busy dealing with their kids. “I’m six miles away from this place and it’s taking me an hour and 20 minutes,” Brian cried. “I went through 20 tolls!”
Welcome to New Jersey, bud.
Daboll did make it to his own introduction on time, and though he’d spent about 40 of the previous 48 hours interviewing candidates for his staff by Zoom, he couldn’t have been in a better mood. “This was a dream come true,” he said.
He’s a 46-year-old father of six who paid a ton of dues under Bill Belichick and Nick Saban before his work under Buffalo’s Sean McDermott finally landed him the big job. He’s replacing a friend, Joe Judge, who also won his opening press conference before failing to win much of anything else over the next two years. Judge had effectively guaranteed that his Giants would conquer the world, one relentless possession at a time, so it was no accident that Daboll said things like, “I’m not going to make any promises or predictions,” and, “I’m not guaranteeing that we’re going to do anything.”
Fast learner, this Mr. Daboll.
But there are two questions this rookie head coach could not answer at the podium. The first is whether he’s capable of leading an entire team as effectively as he led the Bills’ offense. John Mara called the process of trying to identify a candidate who will succeed as the Giants’ coach — without prior head-coaching experience — “the most difficult decision by far that you ever make in this business, because you just don’t know.”
Giants GM Joe Schoen, Daboll’s colleague up north, said he wasn’t concerned about his man’s lack of head-coaching experience because in Buffalo “he’s not just walking around on the offensive side of the ball talking to Stef Diggs and Josh Allen and Devin Singletary. He’s working the whole team. There’s mutual respect. … He can joke around and he can communicate with anybody on the team, whether it’s the 90th man or the best player on the team. And he truly cares about the players and who they are as human beings and wants the best.”
All of which leads to the second question Daboll couldn’t answer Monday, the more fascinating question: Is he too nice of a guy to command an entire team in an unforgiving sport?
Daboll didn’t have much while growing up outside of Buffalo; he never knew his father, and he was raised by his old-school maternal grandparents, Chris and Ruth Kirsten. Ruth was the one who prepared him for the rigors of the NFL. In Brian’s words, she was “harder than Bill or Nick could ever be.” The Kirstens taught him to be true to himself, and whenever he strayed off course someone was there to pull him back in line.
As a young New England assistant, when berating a scout-team player, Daboll was grabbed by Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest, who told him, “Hey little guy, relax right now.” As a rookie coordinator in Cleveland, after botching his first presser with a fake tough-guy act, Daboll returned to his office to a blinking phone light and a voicemail from his wife saying, “What the hell was that?”
So Daboll arrives here committed to being a relationships guy in a results business. He is going to FaceTime his players (a lot), and invite them over for dinner. “I care about them and I care about their families,” he said. “I want to see them do well. I want to see them earn new contracts and make money.”
Daboll will be the guy he was after the Bills beat New England in the playoffs, the guy who put off the celebration for a bit to say hello to ESPN’s Mike Reiss and other Patriots writers gathered outside the interview room, and to ask about their families. Daboll is going to be the guy he was Monday, when he asked a reporter with an all-Brooklyn accent if he was from South Carolina.
Can an NFL head coach win big with that kind of humor and humanity? Well, the Giants just answered that question in a way Leo Durocher never would.
