Copyright The New York Times
The Giants have always preferred tough-guy coaches in the mold of Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin, leaders who could impose their will on a dire situation and inspire men to do things their minds were telling them they could not do. The franchise won all four of its Super Bowl titles with Parcells and Coughlin, former Giants assistants, and they could have won more championships — a lot more — if they didn’t miss what they had on their own staffs in resident hard-asses Vince Lombardi and Bill Belichick. But as much as interim coach Mike Kafka deserves a fair-and-square shot after replacing the fired Brian Daboll on Monday, the Giants will almost certainly find their next full-time head coach, as they say, outside the building. And since co-owner and team president John Mara summoned Daboll into his office to deliver the bad news face-to-face, giving himself, partner Steve Tisch and general manager Joe Schoen (the luckiest 20-40-1 GM in the history of sports) a two-month head start on the search, it’s a good time to play fantasy football. In that game, the best available result would be the Giants naming Mike Tomlin as their next head coach in January. The Steelers coach has ripped off 18 consecutive non-losing seasons (15 of them winning seasons) and is working on No. 19. He is a card-carrying tough guy and a two-time Super Bowl participant and one-time champ who would be a human firewall against the disastrous seasons the Giants regularly serve up to their paying customers. Pairing a young franchise quarterback-to-be in Jaxson Dart with Tomlin’s institutional knowledge on what it takes to succeed in the NFL would be the Giants’ best bet for long-term bliss. Now come your regularly-scheduled disclaimers. Tomlin is under contract in Pittsburgh for two more seasons. Given that the Rooney family has employed three head coaches since the close of the 1968 season – three – it’s unlikely Tomlin will be fired if he fails to win any playoff games for a ninth straight year. His career regular-season winning percentage (.628) is still a tick better than that of the Hall of Famer who preceded him, Bill Cowher (.623), and a lot better than that of the Hall of Famer who preceded Cowher, Chuck Noll (.566). So if Tomlin were to leave Pittsburgh, chances are he’d be leading the conversation. And purely from the outside looking in, Tomlin seems to check a lot of boxes for the prototypical coach in need of a fresh challenge. And that was true before the dreadful national TV performance against the Chargers that left the Steelers at 5-4 and in line for yet another 10-7 or 9-8 season punctuated by a one-and-done postseason exit. Tomlin and the Steelers are locked in a cycle of relative mediocrity that, unscientific surveys would show, has worn down their fan base. If the coach decides to break that cycle, the Giants and their dynamic young quarterback should make all the sense in the world to him. For starters, the Giants and Steelers are close NFL cousins with founding fathers who were among the league’s first guardians. The Maras are the Rooneys, and the Rooneys are the Maras, and you don’t need to be Rooney Mara, the award-winning actress and great-granddaughter of both teams’ founders, to understand that the franchises would make for agreeable business partners in a compensation deal. Tomlin would be worth the price. The Giants absolutely cannot afford to miss on this hire. They cannot afford to hire another Daboll, another Joe Judge, another Pat Shurmur, another Ben McAdoo. They need a head coach with winning NFL experience this time, whether or not Bill Belichick is a part of that discussion. If they want to include big winners in college, then Dart’s former coach at Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin, should be at the top of that list next to Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman. But the Giants’ walk-off home run hire here is the 53-year-old Tomlin, who is two decades younger than Belichick and whose program did not crater after Ben Roethlisberger’s departure like Belichick’s did after Tom Brady’s. Of course, the Giants would never have been in this position had they hired current Chargers general manager and then-Ravens executive Joe Hortiz as GM in 2022, when they signed up Schoen instead. Hortiz wanted to bring current Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh, then at Michigan, to the Giants. Schoen wanted to go with Daboll. How did that work out? In fairness, Daboll had a Coach of the Year debut that included a big playoff victory in Minnesota. But he lost 25 of his last 31 games. Nobody can survive that, with or without the fourth-quarter collapses and with or without the Dart concussion in Chicago. In the end Sunday, all huddled up against the elements, Daboll looked like a guy who was about to trudge up a mountain in the Himalayas … while knowing it wasn’t going to end up a successful climb. He had to go. The Giants owed it to the players who put their bodies on the line every week to find a coach who can put them in position to win. Finally. In a joint statement from Tisch and Mara, who announced in late September that he was undergoing treatment for cancer, the Giants owners said that Schoen will “lead the search for a new head coach” (though don’t be surprised if his status gets reviewed again if Kafka’s Giants finish 1-6) and that ownership “will work to deliver a significantly improved product.” Toward that end, the evidence says the Giants already have their next Eli Manning. Now they need their next Coughlin. Their next Parcells. Tomlin fits the profile. Last time the Giants had an opening, Brian Flores accused them of conducting a sham interview with him in the racial-discrimination lawsuit he filed against the league, even though Mara had personally reached out to the former Dolphins head coach before that interview to assure him he was a serious candidate. But facts are facts: The Giants have been playing football for a long, long time and have never had a Black head coach. Tomlin shouldn’t be pursued for that reason. He just happens to be the best fit in every context. At some point this week, the 2-8 Giants should give an off-the-record head’s up to their good friends and relatives in the Rooney family that this would be something they’d like to discuss at season’s end. Just in case Mike Tomlin, a certain Pittsburgh Hall of Famer, wants to become a legend in New York.
