This was late in a Saturday afternoon during an NCAA basketball tournament, years ago, and Marty Schottenheimer was busy watching the Kansas Jayhawks, coached by his friend and occasional golf partner Roy Williams, try to survive a tough regional game.
By this point of his career Schottenheimer was the most famous man in Missouri other than the governor, and 10 times as popular as the mayor of Kansas City, but he was still afforded a modicum of privacy at a corner booth inside a crowded sports bar in Overland Park, Kan. Halftime arrived. Wings were ordered. Glasses were refilled. And the talk, as it always seemed to around Marty, turned to coaching.
“Here’s the reason it’s such a tough job,” he said. “Your first year, you know nothing. You’re faking it mostly, and hoping for the best. By Year 2, you know all the big-picture stuff: How to reach players, how to motivate them, how to get them ready to play week-to-week. It isn’t until Year 3 that the other stuff clicks: in-game adjustments, clock management, making strategy choices on your feet. Nothing happens overnight.”
He shook his head.
“Problem is,” he said, “a lot of us never make it to Year 3.”
It is a good time to apply that 25-year-old conversation and move it a thousand miles east, where for the first time Brian Daboll is being surrounded by the unmistakable cackling and crackling of critical voices everywhere the New York Giants matter, which is large portions of everywhere in New York City and its satellite suburbs.
The Giants are 2-6, and that would be enough for the jackals to be buzzing the tower. Worse is that he has begun to collect a modest pile of second-guessable transactions, and that he added to that anthology Sunday by having just about every decision he made splatter him in the face, like spittle in the MetLife Stadium wind tunnel, against the Jets.
Worst of all, the perfect storm of backfires and burlesque led the Giants from losing a game in which they had a 99-plus percent chance of winning after 59 ½ minutes had already been played. Sunday he acknowledged that he was going to be an easy piñata, owned it, welcomed it. Monday he said much of the same.
“A few plays here and there,” he said, not bothering to recite them because football fans on both sides of the great divide can already recite them from memory, “and we make one of them, we probably get a different result.”
It really should be remembered that Daboll didn’t grow dense and stupid over the spring and summer. He is still the same coach he was a year ago, when he was celebrated universally — and properly — for a 9-7-1 record and a playoff win, when he won the Coach of the Year. And the biggest element that allowed for success last year — figuring a way to keep a talent-poor team close enough to steal games — is still in effect. Look at the Bills game two weeks ago. Hell, look at the Jets game Sunday.
Two-and-six is galling. But they are that close to being 4-4. If you’re going to deduct points off his grade-point average for kicking a late field goal or not deferring the overtime kickoff, you have to restore a few for that part.
But this goes back to Schottenheimer’s point. Nobody is born a fully formed head coach. Nobody. Sometimes you are blessed with superior talent. Sometimes a team is so bad you can improve in increments. Tom Landry was 0-11-1 his first year. Vince Lombardi was 7-5 but took over a team that was 1-10-1. They could learn on the job in cities more patient than this one and in a time more lenient than this one.
“Most coaches spend most of their time as assistants buried in dark rooms watching tape, but what they’re looking at is completely out of context to the game,” Schottenheimer said. “It took me three years to fully figure out how to use timeouts because that’s just not part of it as an assistant. When fans tell me they could manage the clock better … I mean, they’re not wrong. It takes a while. And hopefully you get a while.”
Daboll shouldn’t have to fret about that. He is still the same coach for whom poems and paeans were written last year. And unless John Mara and Steve Tisch have had a full-on Steinbrenner Transplant — George, not Hal — they have zero desire to make a fourth straight coach walk a second-year gangplank.
Is Daboll a finished product as a coach? He is not. But he wasn’t last year, either, when — as another old Giants coach of some renown liked to quip — a lot of folks were already casting his bust for Canton. He’ll be a better coach next year. Hell, he’ll probably be a better coach next week. Nothing happens overnight. Even coaching genius.
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