Brian Daboll must find way to steer Giants from nightmare scenario

CLEVELAND — It wasn’t Brian Daboll who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But on Sunday at Huntington Bank Stadium against the Browns, Daboll confronts an old familiar fork in the road that has led to too many dead ends for recent Giants teams and regimes. One bad turn deserves another on the Road to Oblivion. A Woe-and-3 start would set Daboll and the Giants up for a doomsday scenario Thursday night when the Cowboys come barging into what would be a seething MetLife Stadium … if not taunting Jerry World East. John Mara has seen 0-2, knows what 0-2 feels like, knows where 0-2 can lead. He knows better than most that it can get late early around here. He has seen 0-2 under Tom Coughlin.He has seen 0-2 under Ben McAdoo, under Pat Shurmur, under Joe Judge.

And now, he has seen 0-2 under Brian Daboll. McAdoo, Shurmur and Judge didn’t make it to a third season.Daboll has. Mara wasn’t ready to offer Daboll an extension after the Giants’ 2-0 start in 2022, and he isn’t ready to start drawing up a short list of coaching candidates for 2025 after 0-2 in 2024.

Nor should he be.Not after two weeks. But for the you-are-what-your-record-says-you-are aficionados, Daboll has lost 13 of his past 19 games, and his rookie Coach of the Year honors seem like a distant memory. “I expect us to take a big step forward,” Mara said in August. He’s still waiting for a first step forward. Daboll doesn’t need to be Coach of the Year on Sunday.

He needs to be Coach of the Day. Be better than Kevin Stefanski.Field a motivated, disciplined, fundamentally sound team that refuses to lose. Otherwise, that’s how a hot seat can become an inferno. This is hardly the start Mara envisioned to the franchise’s 100th anniversary season: 0-2 again … against Sam Darnold and rookie Jayden Daniels.

An 0-3 start against Darnold and Daniels and the ghost of Deshaun Watson, with $60 million man Dak Prescott looming, would signal to the fan base ...