On Nov. 19 at Washington’s FedEx Field in Landover, Md. the 2-8 Giants led the Commanders, 24-12, late in the fourth quarter.
Wink Martindale’s defense had forced four turnovers. Thomas McGaughey’s special teams unit had forced another. And Mike Kafka’s offense, with Tommy DeVito at quarterback, had scored two of its three touchdowns on short fields off those takeaways.
But now Washington’s offense was driving, aided by a Kayvon Thibodeaux roughing the passer penalty outside the red zone. And that’s when Brian Daboll started playing the blame game on Martindale and the defensive staff:
“You’re gonna lose this game just like you lost us the Jets game,” Daboll griped on the headset, according to numerous sources in the building.
Daboll was blaming the defense for the Giants’ infamous 13-10 overtime loss to the Jets on Oct. 29, in which the offense had thrown for -9 yards and Daboll’s late-game mismanagement had opened the door to a full-scale, team-wide meltdown.
Daboll’s divisive finger-pointing wasn’t out of the ordinary. That’s one of the reasons why, sources say, Giants GM Joe Schoen had begun listening in on the coaches’ headsets on game days that week in Washington — although the GM also was taking a step that both the Texans’ Nick Caserio and the Cowboys’ Will McClay have done to gain a better understanding of the game day operation.
Daboll’s sideline behavior was destructive, in many coaches’ opinions. His input was never proactive, always reactionary. And his outrage was rarely accompanied by a suggested solution.
“He has no composure,” one team source said.
America saw it first-hand on Sunday Night Football Oct. 15 in Buffalo. NBC sideline reporter Melissa Stark said a “very frustrated” Daboll couldn’t answer questions at halftime because, he admitted: “My head is not in this. I cannot focus on anything right now.”
Now Schoen was monitoring the dynamic at Washington after being alerted by several meaningful parties that Daboll’s behavior and the sideline dynamic were not constructive.
Schoen would stay on the headsets for four games, sources say – against the Commanders, Patriots, Packers and Saints – before stepping back offline for the final three.
The story of the Giants’ 2023 undoing isn’t about a personal feud between Daboll and Martindale and the past, though. It’s about bad football and a flawed process that still exists inside the Giants’ walls.
It’s about an organization with enough problems that one Giants staffer recently advised an NFL assistant calling about a vacancy:
“Do not come here.”
‘OFF THE WAVE’
Daboll set an adversarial tone in August when he stared down McGaughey, his special teams coordinator, on the sideline after a Lions punt return touchdown. That public showing-up wasn’t appreciated, but Daboll’s rage was nothing new.
He’d eviscerated plenty of people in 2022, like former running backs coach DeAndre Smith, who left for the Colts last offseason. Daboll also lit into Daniel Jones twice in two years, throwing a tablet in disgust next to his quarterback after Jones’ Week 4 pick-six against the Seahawks.
Kafka, the Giants’ young offensive coordinator, however, has received the brunt of Daboll’s fury, according to numerous team sources. He is “constantly second-guessed,” a source said.
Daboll, who got the Giants job due to his work with Josh Allen’s Bills offense, ran a consistently hot temperature as his offense cratered beginning with a 40-0 Week 1 loss to the Cowboys. And he often took it out on his OC.
“He would make [Kafka] run the ball, and then if he called a run [Daboll] didn’t like it, he would motherf–k him,” a source said.
The Giants started 1-5 with only one offensive TD total in their first five losses. Poor O-line personnel and an annual injury problem under this athletic training staff didn’t help. They went three straight games without an offensive TD against Seattle, Miami and Buffalo in Weeks 4-6.
The good fortune of last season’s playoff run had worn off quickly.
“Last season it was like we were riding a wave,” one player said as the season spiraled. “And now, we’re off the wave.”
Daboll took playcalling away from Kafka multiple times, according to sources, and gave it back each time. He gave it to QB coach Shea Tierney for the second half at Dallas in Week 10, per sources.
Daboll’s “unpredictability,” one source said, was his defining trait. There was no pattern, rhyme or reason to his changes from others’ perspectives.
Daboll also took over Kafka’s offensive meetings in Week 7 ahead of a home game against Washington, as the Daily News first reported. And he didn’t give complete control back to Kafka until Week 11, after the offense had averaged 11.75 points during that 1-3 stretch.
With Kafka back at the reins, the Giants scored 24 or more points in five of their final seven games. But Daboll’s impulsive nature also reared its head in how he mismanaged game situations in losses.
His game management in last year’s divisional round in Philadelphia – going for a 4th and 8 on the Eagles’ 40-yard line while trailing 7-0 – sent a message of panic to the team and ended the 38-7 loss in the first quarter.
Then poor situational football cost the Giants their two worst losses: In Week 6 at Buffalo, when Tyrod Taylor received a play call with a run check at the goal line before halftime; and in Week 8 against the Jets, when Daboll sent an injured Graham Gano out to miss a field goal when one yard would have ended the game.
The defense had breakdowns at the end of those defeats, too, but shining blame on those miscues when the offense wasn’t functioning and the end-game decisions were backfiring came off as a lack of accountability to some on staff.
Daboll receives advice on his headset in those moments from an analytics and game management team. But one source called that collaboration a “broken process,” saying it’s not thorough or advanced. And regardless of what is discussed during the week, Daboll’s game day decisions become up-for-grabs, impulse calls without guardrails.
“It’s like, ‘Wait, what did we have that meeting for?” the source said. “There’s a lot of inconsistency or doing the direct opposite of what we had talked about. The rest of the league is too far ahead, and you see it affecting the results of games.”
In a Week 10 blowout at Dallas, the Giants’ offense had 27 yards and one first down in the first half. The defense caved and allowed 640 yards total. And Daboll was ripping the defense so frantically and constantly after positive Cowboys plays that it was interfering with Martindale’s play-calling process, sources said.
Several sources said Martindale asked Daboll to stop so he could get the next play in. The next week, Schoen was on the headsets to monitor the situation for himself.
“You’re living on the edge every week,” a source said of working for Daboll. “It makes it tough to do your job.”
WHERE IT WENT WRONG WITH WINK
There were signs from the first day of last year’s training camp that the Daboll-Martindale dynamic would not work.
When the offense struggled to start camp, Daboll allowed a perception to grow that he had tipped off the defense to play calls in order to create a challenge for Jones.
But the reality, according to sources, was that Martindale’s pressure packages were giving the offense fits. So Daboll told Martindale he was putting a limit on his blitzes for the rest of camp.
That set the tone for an offense vs. defense coaching culture that did not go in the offense’s favor, especially this season.
The defense finished with more takeaways (31) than the offense had touchdowns (25) and scored three TDs on its own. The offense scored more than 14 points only once in the Giants’ first nine games.
The weight of the offense’s struggles became too much for the defense during those blowout losses to the Raiders and Cowboys, the unit’s worst two games of the year.
“We know we have to be perfect because of the offense right now,” a defensive starter said after the Dallas game. “It’s hard.”
The handling of safety Xavier McKinney’s public criticism of the coaching staff after the Week 9 loss to the Raiders was a good window into the Daboll-Martindale rift.
Daboll tried to keep the fallout in-house and did not appreciate that Martindale put McKinney on blast publicly a few days later. But some viewed Daboll’s lack of public consequences for McKinney – and the subsequent leak of his displeasure with Martindale – as the head coach choosing a player over his defensive coordinator.
The outcome was that McKinney, after being held accountable, played his best football in the second half of the season.
But FOX sideline reporter Tom Rinaldi noted an extended, out-of-the-ordinary conversation between Daboll and Martindale on the sideline in Week 10 at Dallas. Then Daboll had McKinney break the team down in the winning Week 11 locker room at Washington.
That all built up to FOX’s Jay Glazer reporting in Week 12 before a win over the Patriots that Daboll and Martindale were “in a bad place.”
No one viewed Daboll giving Martindale the game ball after that 10-7 win over the Patriots as genuine. It was seen as a transparent, staged, public relations move. The players, however, did not mutiny. Daboll had cultivated support in the locker room.
Players stood by him publicly. One player said Daboll’s 2022 playoff berth and win still carried weight during this down time. Players also responded to a lighter practice schedule from training camp to the team’s walkthrough-filled final three weeks of the season.
Plenty of people in the building, including players, coaches and executives, said Daboll bought meaningful capital with last year’s success. But that now the pressure should turn up in Year Three because of how badly Year Two went.
Martindale had a lot of support, as well. Captain and middle linebacker Bobby Okereke stumped the loudest, telling the News in November that losing Martindale would be “devastating,” a sentiment echoed by several players.
Some simply grew tired of hearing about the dueling coach camps.
“Too many egos,” one player said. “Too many egos.”
Ultimately, the Giants fired Martindale’s right-hand man, outside linebackers coach Drew Wilkins, and his brother Kevin on Black Monday without informing the defensive coordinator.
All that did was expedite Martindale’s plan to escape what had become an untenable, unhealthy, losing situation. Martindale blew up at Daboll, according to sources.
“Go f–k yourself,” he told Daboll, who is no stranger to that kind of language. And then Martindale left the building and the team. The Daily News first reported he was resigning.
The official terms of Martindale’s resignation freed him to pursue a head coach or defensive coordinator position with any other team. He gave back his $3.25 million salary for the one year remaining on his Giants contract in return, sources said.
That was a high price to pay, but Martindale clearly determined his freedom and the Wilkins’ reputations were worth it.
The facts, after all, show that the Giants didn’t get rid of any problems here. They lost a respected coordinator because they couldn’t get their own house in order.
