The Giants’ new Buffalo connection is firmly established.
Their hiring of new head coach and ex-Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll has set a Bills’ pipeline in motion. He’ll be formally introduced as the teams’ 20th head coach in franchise history to a new conference Monday.
Daboll became the leading candidate after Ex-Bills assistant GM Joe Schoen was announced as the new GM Jan. 21, and Daboll interviewed with the team for the first time on the same day.
Coincidence? Yes, but try familiarity.
For the Giants, this is the first time in a while that the GM and the head coach have a tight bond with respect for each other. Certainly, Joe Judge and Dave Gattleman didn’t have it.
Tom Coughlin and Jerry Reed may have had some connections, but you really have to go back to Bill Parcells and George Young to have a tough love type of situation.
The potential problem here is the Giants are handing over the reins to a first-time GM and a first-time head coach. These two hires are crucial to the current and future state of the franchise.
This was the time the Giants should have reached out to a head coach, and ex-Dolphins’ boss Brian Flores was considered a hot prospect. It seemed to make more sense to hire a former head coach and even an experienced GM to begin to turn around a franchise that had a 19-46 record over the last four years.
Will familiarity work? It has to.
Schoen said all the right things in his presser, and he plans to build draft first, free agency second. That translates to some rough years ahead. His first signing was ex-Bill Antonio Williams to a futures/ reserve contract, and look for more to come.
Daboll likely would have been hired by another team if not the Giants, and his Bills finished third in the league with a 28.4 points a game average and fifth with 381.9 yards per game. Quarterback Josh Allen had 36 touchdowns and 4,407 yards.
But Daboll won’t have Allen or Stefan Diggs in the Meadowlands and will have to work his magic with Daniel Jones or a rookie quarterback in the next two years.
That decision will be on the initial primary ones for Schoen, even though he has said glowing things about Jones. He also will have to make a major decision on the future of Saquon Barkley. Schoen will have to decide to keep one, both, or neither.
Schoen and Daboll will have a grace period as they have to swim through some cap hell or do some veteran house cleaning. If Schoen is true to his word, this will be a three- to four-year process to get back their winning ways.
The new Giants-Bills era begins next week It appears to be a perfect match on paper with Schoen and Daboll.
It will be interesting to see if it works out.