New York Giants players know the FaceTime calls can come at any hour. On the other end of the video call will be a shirtless Brian Daboll, sitting in his hot tub, smoking a cigar, eager to discuss a new play.
“He has this thing where if he comes up with something, he’s in the jacuzzi, he probably has a cigar and he’ll FaceTime you, ‘Hey, I’ve got this play, can you do this? Can you do this? OK, got it,’” said wide receiver Isaiah McKenzie, who was in Buffalo when Daboll was the Bills’ offensive coordinator from 2018-21. “That’s probably when he makes most of his magic, when he’s in the jacuzzi.”
The frequency of those calls has increased as Daboll enters his third season as the Giants’ head coach and his first season as the team’s offensive play caller. Daboll positioned himself for the head-coaching job he long coveted due to his play-calling expertise in Buffalo, so it’s not a surprise he’s making this adjustment as he embarks on a pivotal season.
“He’s brilliant,” said quarterback Matt Barkley, who spent three years with Daboll in Buffalo before reuniting for part of last season with the Giants. “He fits his offense to work with whoever he’s got. He’s really incredible in that regard. I can’t overstate how much he just gets ball. He’s all ball, all day.”
In hindsight, the bigger question may be why Daboll hasn’t been calling plays all along.
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After Daboll was hired in 2022, general manager Joe Schoen said “ideally” the head coach wouldn’t call plays.
“I would prefer he manages the game,” Schoen said at Daboll’s introductory news conference.
Daboll didn’t make an immediate decision, but he was wary of balancing his new head coaching responsibilities with the time commitment required to prepare to call plays.
“As a play caller, it’s personal,” Daboll told The Athletic. “You have to put a tremendous amount of time into it — over and over and over again throughout the week and call games in your head and go back. You have to be prepared well enough to where you’re not second-guessing it.”
Daboll initially made offensive coordinator Mike Kafka the play caller, an opportunity that helped lure the young assistant from his job as the Chiefs’ quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator.
“Once you call it for a long time, eight years or whatever I’ve been doing it, you’re kind of used to doing it, so it’s kind of like watching your kid go to college,” Daboll said late in the 2022 season. “You’ve got to let them go sometime.”
It didn’t turn out to be a permanent relinquishment. Kafka called plays throughout the Giants’ surprisingly successful 2022 season, but Daboll reportedly yanked the duties multiple times during a messy 2023 season when the Giants finished 6-11 and ranked 30th in scoring (15.6 points per game).
Daboll called plays in every practice and exhibition game this offseason before officially confirming this week that he’s taking over the role. He’s never explained his rationale for the decision, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t have made the change if he didn’t believe he could impact the results.
Of the 18 current head coaches with an offensive background, Daboll will become the 14th to call plays. Some of the best offenses in the league are led by play-calling head coaches, including the Chiefs’ Andy Reid, the 49ers’ Kyle Shanahan and the Rams’ Sean McVay. Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy took over play-calling before Dallas led the league in scoring last season.
No one is expecting Daboll to vault the Giants’ offense into that stratosphere this season, but the stakes are still high. While team ownership has expressed confidence in the Daboll-Schoen regime, if they endure another season like 2023, that could quickly change.
There is a confidence within the team, however, that Daboll being at the controls on game day and putting his imprint on the offense will lead to better results.
“He brings a different type of enthusiasm and aggressiveness and electricity,” said wide receiver Isaiah Hodgins, who spent two seasons with Daboll in Buffalo and the past three seasons together with the Giants. “There’s just a sense of urgency like, ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to score points. We’re going to throw the ball deep. We’re going to convert.’ It’s not like an optional thing. No. This is the standard. Get with it or get lost. … It holds everyone to a higher level.”
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Running back Devin Singletary’s first three seasons in Buffalo overlapped with Daboll’s final three seasons as the Bills’ OC. Singletary reunited with Daboll this offseason, signing a three-year, $16.5 million contract with the Giants. The veteran running back sees a trait in Daboll that separates him from other play callers.
“He has no fear,” Singletary said. “No matter what situation, no matter what time it is in the game, he’s ready to call whatever. You’ve got to love that because I feel like the offense feeds off that energy. Just being fearless, that confidence goes a long way.”
Daboll isn’t quite at Bruce Arians “No risk it, no biscuit” levels, but he believes in taking big swings when they’re presented.
“Every play has a risk-reward to it,” Daboll said. “If you want to do this, it’s a little bit more risky, but the reward is pretty good. There’s times that you choose to call those, there’s times you need to back off. But I think if you have it in, or even if you don’t have it in, and you see something, you have to go with your eyes. You have to go with your preparation and get to it. Trust me, there’s times when you call it when you’re like, ‘Oh, man. I hope this works.’ But you have to show confidence in the players to let them go out there and execute it.”
Barkley experienced that confidence after signing with the Bills during Week 10 of the 2018 season. With the team’s top two quarterbacks, Josh Allen and Derek Anderson, injured, Barkley started 11 days later against the Jets.
“We’re in warmups and the team stretch lines before the game, and he just walks up to me and he goes, ‘Hey, Barks you ready?’ I’m like, ‘Yep.’ He goes, ‘You want to go deep on the first play?’ I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. Let’s do it,’” Barkley said.
So on Barkley’s first snap, Daboll called a play-action pass with double go routes from wide receivers along each sideline. Barkley uncorked a 47-yard strike that set the tone for a 41-10 win.
“He didn’t really have a first 15-(play script) like some coaches do,” Barkley said. “It was kind of just a feel, and that game we needed a little spark. He just has great awareness for stuff like that. He just has that aggressiveness. He wants to come out right away, and he knows when to call those right plays.”
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Giants wide receiver Darius Slayton refers to Daboll as a “mad scientist,” but there’s a method to the coach’s madness.
“He’s methodical in the way he calls the game because there’s rhyme or reason,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said. “When you go back and watch the tape, you can see how he was trying to set you up.”
That ability to set defenses up is at the core of Daboll’s play-calling approach.
“He’s very good at setting up plays,” Barkley said. “Especially with play actions or RPOs, you just have layers to the same look. So you keep running the same run play and then you just tweak it a little bit.”
It’s not a coincidence the Bills led the NFL in play-action usage in Daboll’s final season as OC in 2021 or that the Giants ranked third in 2022.
“It looks the same at the snap to the defense, and then you run a naked or a backside play-action or something when he notices the defense is getting tired or lazy or he knows they’re going to bite on something,” Barkley said. “He’ll just call stuff like that at the perfect time. He’s definitely playing chess not checkers.”
Daboll tries to play through every scenario during the week so he’s ready to make a potential game-changing call if he gets the right look. But that thinking can’t take place exclusively late at night in his hot tub.
He meets with Giants starting QB Daniel Jones more now that he’s calling plays to ensure the quarterback understands his thought process.
“I think the play caller to quarterback are tied together,” Daboll said. “The more the quarterback can understand why I’m calling something and vice-versa, the more I can understand what the quarterback sees or is thinking, that’s really important to me.”
Backup quarterback Drew Lock has been impressed by the level of detail Daboll imparts during the meetings.
“He thinks of everything,” Lock said. “But in reverse, he wants to make it very easy for us. He’s done all the work. He knows what he’s calling; he knows when he’s calling it; he knows why he’s calling it. So it’s, ‘Just look at this guy, read this play, do it this way.’ He’s done the back-end work to make it easy for us to go out there and play, which quarterbacks can appreciate.”
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Spending more with the quarterbacks and running the offensive meetings raises the question about time management that caused Daboll not to call plays when he got hired. But Daboll insists he’s not dedicating less time and energy to defense, special teams or his many other other duties. So how is he managing the balancing act?
“Less sleep,” Daboll said.
There are no assurances Daboll calling plays will lead to success. The Bills ranked second and third, respectively, in scoring in his final two seasons as the team’s offensive coordinator. In Daboll’s six previous seasons as a play caller, his offenses finished 23rd, 30th, 32nd, 20th, 31st and 29th in scoring.
Some of those results can be chalked up to poor personnel. And four of those seasons came early in Daboll’s career, so he has grown as a coach since then.
There are certainly personnel questions surrounding the Giants’ offense this season. But Daboll should have more to work with than Kafka had the past two seasons, with an offensive line fortified by veterans and the addition of a potential game-breaking wide receiver in Malik Nabers.
It’s probably an unfair comparison for a rookie, but it’s impossible not to draw parallels from the Giants’ drafting of Nabers to the Bills’ trade for wide receiver Stefon Diggs in 2020. Diggs’ arrival coincided with Allen’s upward trajectory, and the Bills offense exploded into one of the best attacks in the league.
“Diggs changed the whole dynamic of the team,” said McKenzie, who was with the Giants this offseason before suffering a foot injury in the preseason finale. “Putting him in Dabes’ offense in Buffalo was just icing on the cake. (Nabers) can be the No. 1 guy of an offense and (take) that offense in a better direction.”
Daboll won’t be shy about feeding Nabers if he emerges as a true No. 1 receiver. Diggs led the NFL in targets in his first season with the Bills.
“On his call sheet, on the back side, he has a section with a player’s name and under that certain plays that they’re likely to be targeted on,” Barkley said. “So he knew how to orchestrate that. If a guy is hot, let’s go with him, which was kind of cool to see. I had never seen that on a call sheet.”
Nabers has already reached the status of getting random FaceTime calls from Daboll about the offense.
“It can be any time of the day,” Nabers said. “He might be like, ‘I got a new play!’ I’ll be like, ‘What’s it called?’ He’ll be like, ‘It’s this. It’s sweet. You’re going to love it.’”
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Although he won’t reveal it publicly, it’s obvious that calling plays has Daboll back in his comfort zone. He’s in control as he tries to get the offense — and team — back on track.
“I don’t think there’s any secret recipe,” Daboll said. “Everyone sees the game differently. So if you’ve done this for however long and I’ve done it for however long, we still could look at it and see it differently.”
The Giants are counting on Daboll’s view to produce different results.
(Photo: Perry Knotts / Getty Images)
