Culture
Brian Daboll’s bungling of Graham Gano’s injury emblematic of mismanaged Giants during his tenure
LANDOVER, Md. — The disaster was so predictable that any seasoned New York Giants observer could see it happening in real time.
Washington’s Austin Ekeler broke through a crowd and darted into the open field on Sunday’s opening kickoff of the Giants’ 21-18 loss. The long return forced Giants kicker Graham Gano to give chase, which ended in disaster.
Gano pulled his hamstring as Ekeler blew past him into the end zone. The touchdown was called back due to a holding penalty, but Gano was left writhing in pain on the field.
Losing the kicker on the first play of the game would have merely joined the list of bad breaks to plague the Giants during their interminable run of incompetence if there wasn’t a sense that it could have been avoided. But Gano had been added to the injury report Saturday with a groin injury, and he experienced enough discomfort during pregame warmups that he disrupted his typical routine to retreat to the locker room to get his groin wrapped.
So the Giants had plenty of notice to deploy a contingency plan for their hobbled 37-year-old kicker. The most obvious solution was elevating kicker Jude McAtamney from the practice squad on Saturday to have a ready-made insurance policy.
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But even when the Giants elected not to elevate McAtamney, they still could have added a safeguard after Gano’s disjointed warmup routine. Punter Jamie Gillan could have filled in on kickoffs to preserve Gano for field goals and extra points, thus eliminating any chance of chasing any returners for 40 yards.
Because it’s the Giants, those decisions came back to haunt them in the worst way imaginable. Gillan, who had made 1-of-2 field goal attempts in his six-year career, missed the extra point following the Giants’ first touchdown, so coach Brian Daboll elected to attempt 2-point conversions after the team’s final two scores. Daboll also eschewed a 40-yard field goal on fourth-and-4 with just over two minutes remaining in a tie game.
Both 2-point attempts failed, and rookie wide receiver Malik Nabers’ lone lowlight from a monster 10-catch, 127-yard, one-touchdown performance came with a drop on the fourth down. The Commanders drove down after Nabers’ drop and kicked the game-winning field goal. In a cruel poetic twist, Austin Seibert, whom Washington signed Tuesday, went 7-for-7 on field goals Sunday.
So in a game decided by three points, the Giants failed on three extra-point attempts because of Gano’s injury, and they bypassed a potential go-ahead field goal because Daboll didn’t trust Gillan.
“We thought Graham would be OK,” Daboll said. “He got hurt chasing down a (runner). It was a hamstring. He didn’t hurt his groin.”
These are the types of catastrophes that lead to a coach getting asked about his future two games into his third season. Daboll was asked if he’s concerned about his job security if the results don’t change.
“I’ve done this for a long time. My focus is on our football team,” Daboll said before directing an extended glare at the reporter who asked the question.
Brian Daboll is asked if he’s concerned about his job status:
“My focus in on our football team” pic.twitter.com/YmxGs7YGqU
— Giants Videos (@SNYGiants) September 15, 2024
That was Daboll’s lone testy moment in his news conference that he opened by praising his team’s competitiveness, the play of quarterback Daniel Jones and improvements made after a 28-6 loss to the Vikings in Week 1. Daboll clearly had calmed down after slamming his headset to the ground as Seibert’s 30-yard game-winning field goal split the uprights as time expired.
It’s remarkable how quickly things have turned for Daboll. He was named coach of the year 18 months ago after his surprisingly successful debut season. But the Giants are 6-13 since the start of last season and 9-18-1 since the midpoint of Daboll’s first season.
Whatever touch he had during his first season has disappeared. Instead, there have been too many missteps, with personnel blunders like the Gano mismanagement becoming an alarming trend.
Incredibly, the Giants have put themselves in this situation before with Gano. The kicker was dealing with a left knee injury early last season, but he continued to kick until he missed two field goals in a 13-10 overtime loss to the Jets in Week 8. Gano was shut down after that game and underwent season-ending knee surgery.
There was a similar snafu last week with returner Gunner Olszewski, who suffered a groin injury in practice before the second preseason game. Olszewski was limited in practice leading into Week 1 but was deemed ready to play. He then reinjured his groin in pregame warmups and will miss at least four weeks after being placed on injured reserve on Saturday.
The Giants didn’t have an experienced returner on hand despite Olszewski dealing with the groin injury for three weeks, so wide receiver Darius Slayton was pressed into punt return duty. Slayton failed to cleanly field his first return and then fumbled the ball, but it was recovered by a teammate.
What’s so troubling about these mistakes is that they’re almost entirely in the hands of Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen. They’re not the same as allowing the Commanders, led by rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels, to convert 50 percent of their third downs or to rush for 215 yards. Those are disappointing results, but there’s a variety of factors involved.
But setting the game day lineup is something every fantasy football owner can manage. And it wasn’t a complicated puzzle to assemble to have McAtamney active, either.
The Giants used their two practice squad elevations on linebackers Ty Summers and Tomon Fox. That duo didn’t play a defensive snap but was on the field for every kickoff, kickoff return and punt return. Could the Giants have used other players already on the active roster for those 13 plays? Sure, but even that wasn’t necessary.
The Giants had only 52 players on their 53-man roster after placing Olszewski on IR on Saturday. So they could have signed Summers to the 53-man roster and used an elevation on McAtamney, an undrafted rookie signed out of Rutgers.
The Giants then would have needed to make one more player inactive. They likely would have survived without their No. 5 defensive tackle Jordon Riley playing a handful of snaps, especially at the expense of not having a backup plan for Gano.
“All the decisions that are made are mine,” Daboll said, before later adding that roster decisions are a collective process with Schoen.
“I can’t tell you that he’s going to get hurt chasing a 100-yard kickoff return that was called back”
Brian Daboll with more on the Graham Gano situation: pic.twitter.com/7ZEqqkueJz
— Giants Videos (@SNYGiants) September 15, 2024
These types of miscues are emblematic of an overall sloppy operation. The benefit of the doubt from this regime’s unexpected Year 1 success has faded. Now Daboll needs to figure out how to pull the team out of this spiral.
The first two games of the season were supposed to be the easy part of the schedule. No matter how bleak things have gotten for the Giants during this wretched decade-long stretch, they had at least been able to count on beating Washington. With even that off the table, it’s hard to see where wins will come from.
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Daboll is tasked with finding that answer. Games like Sunday erode the faith in his ability to do so.
(Photo: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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