Another head coach domino has officially fallen with Brian Daboll being fired by the New York Giants. After 10 weeks, they decided they’d seen enough from their head coach of four years, and he marks the first in-season firing to take place in 2025. It comes as a bit of a shock, although Daboll’s seat has been pretty hot all season long.
Giants officially look to future and fire Brian Daboll
It is not at all surprising that a 2-8 team fired a head coach who has a career record of 20-40-1. Winning games is the name of the game in the NFL, and not doing so will result in an untimely end to your coaching tenure. Plus, the Giants have blown late leads in unfathomable ways this year, and someone’s got to pay for those.
However, what is surprising is that the firing is happening now while Daboll still can clearly motivate his team. He coaxed good play out of rookie Jaxson Dart, which is what the Giants really needed to see this year, and has had them competitive most weeks despite a glut of crucial injuries.
Superstar wide receiver Malik Nabers tore his ACL. Breakout running back Cam Skattebo dislocated his ankle. Dart even went down on Sunday with a concussion, which may partly be why the Giants ended up losing. The talent on the roster was already thin, but these injuries and more have given Daboll very little to work with.
Despite that, the Giants haven’t rolled over, which is a sign that they still want to play for their coach. A lost locker room doesn’t even come close to winning some of these games. At some point, the wins have to come for a coach, but firing him now seems rushed. There are seven games left in a lost season, so why not see what a larger sample size of Dart and Daboll looks like? The Giants would lose nothing by waiting to fire him at the end of the year if things don’t improve. Nevertheless, they felt a move was absolutely necessary, and Daboll will now be looking for another job.
He’ll likely go back to being an offensive coordinator for a while. It’s very rare for a coach to get fired midseason and end up as a head coach immediately after somewhere else, although it happened in the NFC East a few years back. The Carolina Panthers fired Ron Rivera in the middle of a season, and he joined the Washington Commanders as head coach not long after that. Still, Rivera was a two-time Coach of the Year, and Daboll is not.
What other coaches could join Brian Daboll?
It’s not as if other teams were waiting for the dam to burst before firing their coaches, but this could serve as a convincing move. There are so many coaches on the hot seat who could join Brian Daboll either now or after the season. Brian Callahan of the Tennessee Titans was first, and now Daboll. Who could be next?
The Cleveland Browns may fire Kevin Stefanski after a dreadful year and a loss that happened because the defense jumped offsides, allowing a first down that ended the game. The Carolina Panthers have routinely looked unprepared under Dave Canales, and they just lost to the 1-8 New Orleans Saints at home. The Miami Dolphins say they won’t fire Mike McDaniel in-season, but after it’s over? All bets are off.
The Pete Carroll experiment in Las Vegas has gone horribly wrong, and as the oldest coach in the NFL, his time may be up soon. The Aaron Glenn era in New York has also been awful, and with how bad they’ve been for a while, it wouldn’t be a surprise if ownership moved on quickly. Raheem Morris may be on borrowed time in Atlanta, and Jonathan Gannon might end up available, too, although both would be fairly big shocks.
