Brian Daboll didn’t sleep much after the Giants’ season opener, though his worst nightmares wouldn’t have been much scarier than his freshest memories.
A 40-0 loss Sunday to the Cowboys — the eighth-most lopsided defeat in franchise history — featured the stuff of horror shows: Zero sacks. Seven sacks allowed. One completion longer than 9 yards. Five fumbles. Two interceptions, including a pick-six. A blocked field goal returned for a touchdown.
“You know that’s what happened,” Daboll said Monday as he picked up the pieces. “You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it. You own it and then you move on.”
The 2022 NFL Coach of the Year was tasked with getting a shell-shocked team harboring quiet Super Bowl goals to navigate the fine line between addressing the roots of a five-alarm fire and turning the page.
“It was just embarrassing,” cornerback Adoree’ Jackson said. “I know we all felt that, whether it was us as players, the coaches, the staff, the organization.”
It is Daboll’s first real crisis to navigate, but panicked Giants fans don’t need a lesson on the dangers of spiraling after Year 2 of the tenures for Ben McAdoo (1-8 stretch), Pat Shurmur (nine-game losing streak) and Joe Judge (1-8 to finish the season) unexpectedly went off the rails.
“When you get beat like the way we got beat, no excuses,” Daboll said. “There’s a lot of pride in that locker room from the people, and you have a game like that — from, really, top to bottom — it’s not an easy thing.”
OK, no excuses. How about some solutions?
Even as Daboll said “it starts with me” and singled himself out for not getting players past the “slippery slope” of big plays in the first quarter, it was not difficult to imagine that personnel changes could be in the works after one of the worst beatings of his 24-year NFL career.
Consider that off of a Week 1 win last season, the Giants made two significant lineup changes: Receiver Kenny Golladay and linebacker Austin Calitro both went from starting and logging more than 40 snaps in Week 1 to five or fewer in Week 2.
The minimized roles proved not to be matchup-specific by remaining thereafter.
Pulling the plug after one game might sound overreactive when compared with the offseason résumé built to become a starter, but the cliché says film doesn’t lie.
The most likely place for a change this week is at right guard, where Mark Glowinski struggled after beating out Josh Ezeudu … but there is no shortage of possible tweaks.
“We evaluate the tape with a critical eye, starting with us as a staff and the players,” Daboll said. “You take into account what happened the previous game and you have difficult discussions if you need to have them, and then try to make the best decision you can for the team. You do look at performance in training camp — no question about it — but you also are real with performance in the game.”
Just like he evaluates players, veterans want to see a head coach who is “not changing” his personality and routines when tested by adversity, Jackson said.
A few schematic answers for how to execute better would be welcome, too.
“When you’re young, you kind of just think that, ‘Oh, we’ll work hard and we’ll get a different result,’ ” receiver Darius Slayton said, “but as you grow in this league, you experience things.
“Last year, the little success that we did have, we got on the other side of that fence, so now we know what it takes to win these games — and we know what we need to do to fix it. Whereas in my first three years we were 4-12, 6-10, [4-13], we knew nothing about winning.”
The first step out of the darkness was the necessary evil of reliving the blowout in Monday’s film review.
“I think if you want to get better, it shouldn’t be hard to watch the film,” Jackson said. “If it means something to you and it’s very important, that’s what you want to do. To try and improve, it’s all about learning from mistakes. We talked about not being a repeat offender.”
That would make for a lot of restless nights.
