Brian Daboll says Giants' win over Jaguars 'shouldn't have come down to' tackle at 1

Jacob Camenker

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Brian Daboll says Giants' win over Jaguars 'shouldn't have come down to' tackle at 1 image

The Giants have played in plenty of close games to start the season, but none were closer than their Week 7 victory over the Jaguars.

New York's 23-17 win Sunday was decided by a single yard. The Jaguars were about to complete at least a game-tying touchdown drive when Christian Kirk's forward progress was stopped by Fabian Moreau and Xavier McKinney at the Giants' 1 with about three seconds left.

The Jaguars were out of timeouts and didn't have enough time to line up and run another play.

The Giants improved to 6-1 thanks to the critical stop.

First-year coach Brian Daboll was "happy" with the play and liked watching his players compete to stop Kirk, but he wasn't pleased with the Giants' overall play.

"It was good to get a win, (but) it shouldn't have come down to that, though," he said during his postgame news conference.

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Why did Daboll feel this way? He felt that the team came up short on both sides of the ball.

Like I say every week, there's certain things to clean up and this week's no exception. Now there's some good things we did too. I thought [the] offense got off to a fast start to a good job again. Did a good enough job converting third downs; did a good enough job in the red zone; took care of the ball defensively; got the ball out there when they were going into the red zone; had a critical fourth down stop.

So again, critical moments, that was good. But we gave up too many yards. We didn't capitalize in the red zone; didn't finish the game the way we should have finished the game. So, you know, there's always things to clean up. 

This is a fair assessment from Daboll. The Jaguars outgained the Giants 452-436 and averaged 7.0 yards per play. And while the Giants' offense performed well, especially on the ground, it scored just one red-zone touchdown in five trips.

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Still, Daboll was able to become first Giants head coach since 1929 to start his career 6-1.

Despite their flaws, the Giants are turning themselves into one of the NFL's most surprising — and best — teams.

Jacob Camenker

Jacob Camenker Photo

Jacob Camenker first joined The Sporting News as a fantasy football intern in 2018 after his graduation from UMass. He became a full-time employee with TSN in 2021 and now serves as a senior content producer with a particular focus on the NFL. Jacob worked at NBC Sports Boston as a content producer from 2019 to 2021. He is an avid fan of the NFL Draft and ranked 10th in FantasyPros’ Mock Draft Accuracy metric in both 2021 and 2022.