Brian Daboll Took This Huge Risk, and the NY Giants are Reaping the Rewards
Brian Daboll has been a revelation for the New York Giants.
The long-time offensive coordinator for the Buffalo Bills was hired to be the coach in New York last offseason, and entered the 2022 campaign leading a team with limited expectations for success.
That didn't slow Daboll, nor his staff, down as they brought the Giants to an unprecedented playoff berth. His impact has been felt all over the team's roster, and one of the players that has seemed to benefit the most from his tutelage has been QB Daniel Jones.
Their relationship started with a bit of tension, however, as Daboll chose to test Jones' character before he even took a regular season snap under center.
Inside Brian Daboll's Preseason 'Adversity Test' for QB Daniel Jones
A story from USA Today's GiantsWire broke down a unique approach to preseason training camp that was used by New York Giants' rookie head coach, Brian Daboll, while working with quarterback Daniel Jones.
The story centers around a pre-planned adversity test. In short, Daboll intentionally made training camp more difficult for Jones compared to his fellow QBs, in order to test his resiliency when met with failure.
The test worked like this: Daboll would tell the team's new defensive coordinator, Wink Martindale, the exact play that Jones and the offense would be running. Martindale would call defensive plays that would effectively shut down the offense, causing Jones to fail.
On purpose.
Then, when Jones' main competitor for the team's starting job, Tyrod Taylor, would take snaps under center, Daboll would do the opposite. Taylor would be set up for success, while Jones would be set up for failure.
Daboll wanted Jones to deal with failure on a daily basis, according to the report, to see how he would handle it. When you coupled the on-field struggles with the barrage of attention from the media that he was getting, both in New York and nationwide, it made for a very difficult preseason camp for the Giants' starting quarterback.
And yet, according to the source quoted in the story, Jones passed with flying colors, and the New York Giants are currently reaping the rewards.
Look, could this be fabricated? Yeah, maybe it is. It could simply be a cover-up, or a stretching of the truth, in order to explain what was indeed a pretty dismal training camp performance.
Here's my question in response to that: if that's true, then why does this story get told now? Why, after the Giants make the playoffs for the first time since 2016, are we hearing about this devious plot hatched in the middle of the summer?
If you want my two cents, this story is true, and Brian Daboll should be commended for it. Yes, it's certainly a risk to set up your star player for failure before you've truly worked with him, but what choice did Brian Daboll really have?
He had to see if Jones was worth working with, and worth mentoring, or whether the team should've looked to Tyrod Taylor to try to win football games in 2022. Clearly, Jones was worth the effort that has since been put in by the staff, and now, he's likely going to be the team's starter next season.
And that, right there, makes every bit of self-imposed adversity worthwhile.