Big Blue View
At this point in the 2025 NFL season, there really isn’t much left to learn about this New York Giants team. They’re bad. As a former scientist, I do appreciate that ownership has tried to apply the scientific method to understand why.
Two hypotheses were offered by fans and the Giants beat writers in mid-season. The Giants are bad because (a) the coaches are bad, or (b) the players (and hence the general manager) are bad. They couldn’t realistically fire the entire coaching staff in mid-season, but they did fire the two most frequent targets of fans’ and writers’ wrath, head coach Brian Daboll and defensive coordinator Shane Bowen. They’ve now run the experiment for five weeks, taken the Petri dish out, and the results are in: The Giants still stink. So we now know it wasn’t (just) the coaches, although it’s possible that Mike Kafka and Charlie Bullen are as bad as Daboll and Bowen.
No scientific experiment is perfect, but today we got another data point. What did we learn from the Giants’ 16-13 loss to the Minnesota Vikings?
When Brian Daboll was still head coach, the Giants had some of their most successful offensive games this season after Jaxson Dart took over as starter. That more or less continued until Dart’s concussion in Chicago, during another blown fourth quarter lead, precipitated Daboll’s dismissal. Kafka, who supposedly had been given back the play calling this year, now had complete charge of the offense, and it looked good, even great at times, in his first two games as head coach with Jameis Winston at the helm.
Since Dart returned, though, things haven’t been the same…except for the losing. Dart has played some of his worst ball since returning to the lineup against New England. Today was clearly the worst game of his Giants career, with only 33 yards passing on the day. Maybe the absence of designed runs has taken something important from his arsenal.
Or maybe Kafka is coaching scared. Last week I was upset at how often he called running plays on 2nd and 10 after incomplete passes. Today Kafka just bypassed first down passes completely for a while. Kafka called runs on the Giants’ first four offensive plays. The first two worked for big gains, but the next two didn’t. Kafka finally called passes on two consecutive plays, neither of which worked, but both of which were canceled by Minnesota penalties. Given new life at the Vikings’ 16 yard line, Kafka called three consecutive runs that only got them to 4th and goal at the 5 yard line. THEN, rather than kick the field goal to get back to a 3-3 tie, he decided to have Dart pass…which resulted in a sack and change of possession.
This is terrible play calling. You’re telling your QB that you have no faith in him. It brought back memories of the final two games of the Joe Judge Experience,...
