New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll certainly brought the excitement with his first game as the Giants head coach, making a bold call to go for a 2-point conversion with 1 minute, 6 seconds remaining that led to a shocking victory over the Tennessee Titans on the road.
Giants quarterback Daniel Jones converted a shovel pass to running back Saquon Barkley to take the 21-20 Week 1 win.
“Go for the win,” Daboll said, according to ESPN’s Jordan Raanan. “We’re going to be aggressive. That is what we want to do. That is the mindset I want the players to have. If it didn’t work, I can live with it. I thought that was the right decision.”
“I said, ‘Hey … if we score, I’m going for two. You good with that?’ They said, ‘Heck yeah!'”
“When we scored, I was on the field and I saw him put up the ‘two’ sign and we kind of made eye contact,” Barkley said. “He gave me that look, and I knew what the play was going to be. He gave me that look and I kind of looked back at him and said, ‘F— yeah.’
“We called it up and we were able to execute the play and get in. He’s a man of his word. He told us he’s going to be aggressive. He told us he’s going to lean on the players to make plays. In that situation, he did exactly that. When you have a coach like that, it’s definitely going to make you go out there and fight for him and execute in those situations.”
Daboll said that this would be the way that he coached when he was hired back in January, and told his players the same thing on Saturday night.
“I knew that before the game even started,” Giants receiver Sterling Shepard said of the decision to go for two. “He told us he wasn’t going to coach scared. That is exactly what he did. We all knew it. We all knew we were going for it because he told us [Saturday] night.
“He told us, ‘I’m not going to coach scared.’ I believe everything the man says.”
“He has trust in us. That just shows it. We appreciate that. We want to be put in those pressure situations. We have guys that really want to be in those positions to make that play. Everyone in that huddle, I asked them who is going to make that play. So we were all ready to make it.”
