Brian Daboll was the reigning NFL Coach of the Year when the Cowboys showed up at MetLife and beat the Giants 40-0 in their season opener.
“It was a bad game. That’s on me,” Daboll said after the game.
It was a bad game at the start of a bad season, but Daboll seems to know exactly what he’s looking for to prevent a repeat of that in his next big season as coach.
He doesn’t want anyone to bully the Giants again.
He wants the Giants to be bullies.
Remember, the Pat Riley Knicks weren’t the most talented team, but they beat opponents with toughness, grit, and of course, Hall of Fame coaching.
Mark Jackson recently spoke about Riley’s no-layup rule: “If you’re doing a layup and you have a chance to hit the guy, you get fined $500. And we made our players abide by that.”
No layups for Daboll’s Giants.
Any giant, any of the three phases.
“I think we have a lot of tough, young players in our draft pool,” Daboll said Friday, “but we’re always reinforcing the fundamentals that we want from our team. It’s a tough game and I think you have to be mentally and physically tough. I think we’ve added a lot of new pieces to our team that contribute to that. Going forward, we’ll just have to build on that. We’ll continue to emphasize the physical side of the game.”
Malik Neighbors: check. Tyler Nubin: check. Dru Phillips: check. Theo Johnson: check. Offensive line additions: check. Brian Burns: check. Tyrone Tracy: check. Darius Mouasau: check. Oh, Daniel Jones: check.
When Daboll first took over for Joe Judge, I asked him to define toughness.
“To me, mental strength is doing the right thing for your team when everything else is going wrong,” Daboll said. “And physical strength is the ability to push through when you’re tired or in pain… and that’s [the] The ability to be aggressive when we need to be aggressive.”
Daboll, now in his third year, seems eager to field the kind of team that Coach Judge promised in his inaugural press conference: “This team represents this region, so I’m going to put out on the field something that this city and this region can be proud of.”
You don’t play under Bill Parcells or Tom Coughlin unless you’re mentally and physically tough, and in his 2004 press conference after joining the Giants, Coughlin railed against the injuries that had crippled the team.
“This is cancer. Let’s admit it,” he said. “This is something that needs to be fixed. I believe it’s more of a mental problem than anything else.”
Parcells has long marveled at the way Lawrence Taylor, playing in a shoulder harness, led an underpowered Giants to a win over the Saints at the Superdome in 1988.
“I think that was his finest moment in terms of bravery,” Parcells would say.
Daboll couldn’t resist offering one harsh criticism after another as he answered a number of questions during his postgame press conference Thursday night.
On Drew Lock: “What I’m proud of is we controlled the line of scrimmage. We ran the football, which is what you need to do.”
“I’m proud of the way we established the line of scrimmage, and we need to continue to do that throughout the season,” he said of his debut as a play-caller.
On running back Eric Gray: “But it starts with the offensive line. Creating holes. He made some good runs in open space. … We’ve got to continue that and try to establish the run game.” [Be a] “It’s a physical team.”
On Boogie Basham: “I thought we played physical. We strive to be a physical football team in all three areas.”
On the new kickoff rules: “Again, we need to be a physical team.”
On offseason focus: “Being mentally tough, being physically tough, I think that’s something we have to work on. … We’re still a work in progress, but we’re going to work on being physically tough.”
One example is the joint training match against the Lions: “We still have a long way to go, but the style of football we play, I consider it to be physical football.”
Daboll’s bully.
Giants bully.
