This is it.
The Giants’ two games in the next five days could determine Brian Daboll’s fate and maybe Joe Schoen’s, too.
“Everyone knows the situation,” one player said this week.
The situation is this: the Giants (0-2) need a couple wins immediately to stop this train from veering off the tracks.
They’re visiting the Browns on Sunday in Cleveland. Then they’re hosting the Dallas Cowboys in New Jersey on Thursday Night Football.
They have a chance to calm the storm.
All three of their NFC East rivals are underdogs with 1-1 records in Week 3. A Giants win in Cleveland and losses by the Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Commanders would tie the entire division up at 1-2.
But if the Giants lose these next two games — and if the Cowboys game gets as toxic and embarrassing on national television as the Vikings season opener was in Week 1 — all bets are off for how co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch will react.
Nose tackle Dexter Lawrence, the Giants’ best player, said this week: “I hate losing with a passion.” And his veteran teammates share his disgust, because they know what constant losing means: Change. Firings. More losing.
Wide receiver Darius Slayton and Lawrence both were drafted in 2019. The Giants have a 29-55-1 record, a .341 winning percentage, in their time here. So they’re already on their third head coach in six years, and they know the only way to stop that treadmill is to win.
“I hate losing, too,” Slayton said at his locker Thursday. “We’ve done a lot of it in our time here, guys like me, Dex, [left tackle] Andrew [Thomas]. We all know the urgency we need to have to get wins so we don’t end up like we have in the past.”
Sunday’s game at Cleveland’s Huntingdon Bank Field, therefore, means everything.
The Giants cannot be expected to win on Thursday against Dallas. Schoen and Daboll have an 0-4 record against the Cowboys and have been outscored 140-53 in those games.
They have to win Sunday against the Browns as 6.5-point road underdogs. They have to find a way. Or else Daboll’s postgame press conference facial expressions in Cleveland will make his Week 2 Washington staredowns look like warm smiles.
In the face of dire potential consequences, edge rusher Brian Burns said the players’ urgency has nothing to do with anything but the obvious: getting their first win. That’s it. It all starts there.
“I think all the urgency is just focused on getting that first dub on the board,” Burns said. “I always feel like it’s hardest to get started. Once you get things rolling and you get a little momentum and things are going in a specific direction, it’s a little bit easier. So that’s the urgency in it.”
Burns is new to the Giants, only two games into a mega-contract, but he said he likes how certain Daboll is of his plan.
“Obviously I’m new, but since the time I’ve been here, Daboll doesn’t show a lot of uncertainty,” Burns said. “I feel like he has a vision, he has something he’s striving [for], and he has the way he wants to go about it. And that’s always been pretty inspiring to me, when you’ve got head coaches or leaders in general that are certain about whatever they’re talking about.”
Burns said Daboll’s certainty reminds him of how former Panthers interim head coach Steve Wilks led the players when he took over in Carolina in 2022 and went 6-6 in 12 games.
“[You don’t want someone who] doesn’t know quite exactly where he wants to go or what he’s doing,” Burns said. “Daboll is very head-on on exactly what he wants, how he wants it. Something I can think of that reminds me of that is when Wilks took over in Carolina. That was one of his main things. I saw him, he was never uncertain about nothing, whether he was wrong or not. I think [guys] responded well.”
Giants ownership wants stability more than anything in its leadership. That’s especially true after Mara and Tisch fired the previous three head coaches either during or after their second seasons.
Daboll is the first Giants head coach to even make it to his third season since Tom Coughlin.
They are not going to tolerate regression, however. That is where they draw the line. That is Mara’s barometer. He wants to walk off the field at the end of the season believing the franchise is headed in the right direction.
As of Saturday, two of the Giants’ top four receivers, Slayton and Jalin Hyatt, have spoken about possibly being traded since the spring.
Schoen was caught by HBO’s cameras undercutting his current starting quarterback to Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles.
A prominent ESPN story ran last Sunday noting that Daniel Jones’ injury guarantee is the kind of contractual kicker that has prompted quarterback benchings in the past.
Then the circus was in town for last week’s kicking fiasco, which — make no mistake about it — the players knew contributed to costing them a game they could have won.
Jones, Malik Nabers and other top contributors still professed confidence in their ability to turn this around and beat the Browns on Sunday. The offense in particular felt like they found something against the Commanders.
“Confidence is high because last game, other than three or four snaps [on offense], we played well enough to win,” Slayton said. “There’s a difference between playing winning football and falling short and going out there and playing like crap.”
There is a big difference. And in these next five days, if the Giants put the wrong kind of football on the field again, it could be the reason behind Daboll not finishing his third season and the temperature rising on Schoen’s seat.
