With Brian Daboll leading Big Blue, it’s a good time to be a fan
NEW YORK — We get the Giants back on Sunday. The Giants matter again, in January, for the first time in too long a time. These things don’t happen for them in September, even when they start off everything that has happened with a game they shouldn’t have won against the Titans, because the new coach laid it all on the line with a two-point, truth or dare, win or lose, conversion. These things don’t even happen against a bustout team like the Colts on the day the Giants made it back into the postseason.
It happens the way it happens on Sunday, in Minneapolis, as the Giants try to win the kind of underdog game they have won before at this time of year.
They did it under Bill Parcells and they did it under Tom Coughlin, who won as many Super Bowls as Parcells did. Now they try to do it under Brian Daboll, who has changed everything with the Giants sooner than either Parcells or Coughlin did before him.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, not this season. Sure, maybe next season, or the one after that. But now it has happened in real time. Daboll’s Giants have played as hard as anybody in the league from that first Sunday in Nashville, when the coach challenged them to change what really has been a loser narrative for far too long, and turned a once-proud franchise into a joke. It was Daboll’s way of saying that Ben McAdoo was gone and Pat Shurmur was gone and so was Joe Judge, whom Giants owners talked themselves into believing was some kind of new Lombardi.
Even when they had gone winless over four games and it looked as if the whole thing was about to fall apart, as if they might stumble toward the finish line the way so many other Giants teams have since that last Super Bowl over the Patriots in Indy, Daboll challenged them to be different, and better. And they were.
I don’t know that Brian Daboll will win Coach of the Year. There have been other dazzling coaching jobs around the NFL this season. Kyle Shanahan is working on his third quarterback and the 49ers still haven’t lost in months and might win it all. Nick Sirianni was tremendous in Philly, and the Eagles might have gone 16-1 if Jalen Hurts hadn’t gotten hurt. But no one has coached his team better than Daboll has as a rookie.
Now, if you consider the alternatives, they get a dream first-round opponent in the Vikings. It doesn’t mean the Giants should be favored, even if the whole world seems to have fallen in love with them since the first-round matchups were locked in. The Vikings have been a pretty tough out themselves all season, and won one close game after another. The Vikings are at home and ought to be favored. The Giants still get this chance to win the kind of underdog game they kept winning on their way to two Super Bowls. They won in 20-below weather in Green Bay when they weren’t supposed to and they won in old Candlestick Park in the rain when they weren’t supposed to. And there was the time they went into Dallas and beat the Cowboys in a year when the Cowboys were 13-3.
When that one was over, in old Texas Stadium, the home crowd was so quiet you could hear Michael Strahan yelling at them all over the place. They don’t have Strahan, one of the greatest Giants of them all now. They don’t have big-game Eli. This defense is not Strahan’s defense. Daniel Jones, as well as he has come on this season, isn’t the Eli Manning who twice ran the table in January and February, not yet and, despite all the promise he has shown this season, maybe not ever.
But this team has not just gotten some breaks along the way — Lamar Jackson, when he was still playing, gift-wrapped a fourth quarter at MetLife — it has made its breaks.
For all the bright talk about what Dave Gettleman’s Guys, Jones and Saquan Barkley, have done this season, it has been Wink Martindale’s flinty defense that has evoked memories of the good old days and being so much better than any Giants fan could have expected coming into 2022.
Brian Daboll’s players will absolutely be underdogs on the road on Sunday, a little after four o’clock Eastern. But in Giants history, at least in this century, that has been a part of the team’s DNA. Seven times in the postseason, a record, Eli quarterbacked an underdog team to victory. Only once in the two Super Bowl years for Eli and Coughlin did the Giants play a home game, against the Falcons, almost eleven years ago exactly. After that, they went to Lambeau Field and knocked off a 15-1 Packers team quarterbacked by Aaron Rodgers and before very long, Eli was throwing one deep to Mario Manningham at Lucas Oil Stadium.