Bruce Arians stood in front of the players who authored one of the NFL’s best one-year turnarounds of the last decade and lit a fire that extinguished any hint of complacency.
So what if the Cardinals jumped from five wins in 2012 before Arians arrived to 10 in 2013? No Super Bowl, no good, he believed.
And just like that, the bar for the future was raised.
“You embrace the level of expectation,” Arians told The Post. “If you are a good coach, you will keep building on the momentum and raising expectation levels — that what we did last year wasn’t good enough. It really doesn’t matter what others expect because we expected a Super Bowl. To make it to the playoffs, or to win two playoff games and lose, we were going to be pissed.”
Are you listening, Brian Daboll?
The Giants are one of three teams entering the 2023 season in the same boat once occupied by Arians’ Cardinals — as teams that made the seismic leap from bad to good in one season.
And, though Daboll rarely publicly breaks from his one-day-at-a-time mantra, he is pushing the same buttons that Arians once did after the Giants unexpectedly jumped from four wins in 2021 to nine plus a playoff victory in his first season at the helm.
Yes, there are big expectations for 2023.
“It starts from Dabes letting us know, ‘It’s just one playoff game. We don’t have the right to hold our heads high and not come to work hard every day. We need to strive for more,’” veteran defensive lineman Leonard Williams told The Post. “We have leaders like Dexter Lawrence saying, ‘We’re not building anymore. We’re going to win.’ A lot of times it’s about not being satisfied.”
While accelerating to contention ahead of schedule is the dream of every win-now fan and impatient team owner, bypassing the normal stepping stones can be risky.
“I’ve been in the scouting department, I’ve been around a lot of general managers, and I know success isn’t always the best thing because you can do bad things and still win games and forget what got you where you were going,” said NFL Network analyst Maurice Jones-Drew, who made the playoffs once during a nine-year playing career.
“It starts with your GM making sure that your roster is ready and talented enough to make a push. Your coach has to find a way to get players not to focus on outside things and worry about one day at a time. And, as players, you can’t change who you are after a little success.”
Since 2010, 26 NFL teams that tallied five or fewer wins one season have increased their win total by at least five the next season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Of the 23 that have completed the season following their breakthrough, only five increased their win total while 12 took a step backwards — not a trend that bodes well for the 2023 Giants, Jaguars and Lions.
“For the Giants, there is no reason to be afraid of the expectations,” NFL Network analyst Jason McCourty said. “Daboll instilled a new culture and they believe in him. A year later, you are bringing in more players to fit your system.
“It doesn’t mean you are going to win 12 games this year because you won nine last year, but it’s just about developing a foundation that they established last year. At the same time, this is a team that won a playoff game last year, so you’d be crazy to say, ‘If they win 10 games this year and miss the playoffs it was a good season.’”
The right ingredients
So, how do you know if a team that appears to be on the upswing is legitimate? Or a one-year fluke?
Of the five teams that built on their breakout, four were led by offensive-minded head coaches, four were quarterbacked by ascending youngsters within their first three NFL seasons, four assembled a top-10 ranked scoring defense and four maintained the same offensive and defensive coordinators.
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Don’t sleep on the significance of coaching continuity — one of two of those four markers that applies to the Giants, along with Daboll’s offensive background — said retired cornerback Prince Amukamara, who points to defensive coordinator Vic Fangio as a big reason that his Bears went from five wins in 2017 up to 12 in 2018 and down to eight in 2019 after Fangio’s departure.
“He’d been working on that defense for years, and where he had us in 2018, we were one of the best,” Amukamara said. “I look at, ‘Do we have a great quarterback?’ It doesn’t matter what people say or what stats he had, but do we believe we have a great quarterback that the world just hasn’t seen? And then I go to, ‘Do we have a great defense?’ Those two things can predict success.”
History shows, to nobody’s surprise, the quickest path to a regression is quarterback instability — be it due to a benching (2013 Vikings), contract dispute (2016 Jets), retirement (2019 Colts) or injury (2020 49ers). Another indication of a possible pretender is over-reliance on winning close games: Teams that kept improving had a .512 winning percentage in games decided by eight points or less compared to the .589 winning percentage for teams that wound up as one-hit wonders.
That’s more troubling for the Giants — 8-4-1 in one-score games last season — than the Jaguars (4-6) or Lions (4-5).
“There is so much more parity in the NFL than you see in other sports,” said Amukamara, a Super Bowl champion with the 2011 Giants who coincidentally twice saw former teams make big jumps the season after he left in free agency. “When teams don’t have you on their radar, they kind of overlook you. People are going to start giving the Giants their best because the Giants are back and not to be messed with.”
It is understandable if Giants fans are cautiously optimistic. The closest example in recent franchise history is the spike from six wins under Tom Coughlin in 2015 to 11 under Ben McAdoo in 2016, which proved to be a fluke when 2017 was marred by injuries and the benching of Eli Manning, and gave birth to a five-year stretch as the losingest team in the league.
Around that same time, Williams was coming to terms with evidence that the Jets he joined as a rookie — a plus-six improvement to 10 wins under first-year coach Todd Bowles in 2015 — were not sustainable.
“It definitely sucked … because I felt like I was a part of a reason they were building something good there,” Williams said. “I’m trying to learn from that now and trying to make sure the younger guys understand that we can’t base this year off of last year. I think it makes guys lax a little bit when you say, ‘We are building.’ It makes you not believe you can win that year. We have all the pieces we need. We have the coaches we need.”
Aggressive thinking
A deeper analysis of history reveals that 14 of the 26 ahead-of-schedule teams since 2010 — including the Giants and Jaguars — had their five-win (or more) jump in Year 1 of a new coaching regime. Daboll, Arians and the Bears’ Matt Nagy all won NFL Coach of the Year honors for guiding quick turnarounds.
There is a natural new-coach bump that needs to be replaced when it fades in Year 2, and the best supplement is talent. Whereas Arians’ Cardinals concentrated on the offensive line, the Giants added speed on both sides of the ball in Darren Waller, Parris Campbell, Jalin Hyatt, Deonte Banks and Bobby Okereke.
“When it’s. ‘We’re closer than you thought,’” said Arians, who also was the offensive coordinator for the Colts when they had a nine-win improvement in 2012, “all the owners are the same in that when you show them you can win, their pockets open up a little bit more and you can be a little more aggressive.”
The moves the Giants made have Sterling Shepherd — a holdover from the disastrous 2016-17 transition — talking of “hanging a banner” and Lawrence mentioning the Super Bowl. And, of course, there is Daboll privately reinforcing how the Giants “got smoked in the playoffs” to preemptively guard against a letdown.
“I don’t think it’s ever bad to have expectations on you,” Jones-Drew said. “But in your building, when you have those meetings with your owner and personnel people, you have to be brutally honest on where you think you’ll be.”
McCourty experienced a jump from three wins to nine with the 2015-16 Titans. He was part of a winless Browns team that won seven games the next season when he was off winning a Super Bowl with the Patriots.
“The majority of my 13-year career we set goals for the season and everybody said the same thing in August: ‘Our goal is to win a championship,’” McCourty said. “I’ve been on many a roster where you know damn well you have no chance at winning a championship. The faster you get to where it’s actually a believable goal, you are moving in the right direction.”
The Giants think they are the exception to the trend of ahead-of-schedule teams sinking back to the pack.
“I’m striving for a ring,” Williams said. “One playoff season isn’t going to get you that.”
