Inside Brian Daboll’s plan to turn Jaxson Dart into a star and save his own career

When Brian Daboll was hired as offensive coordinator of the Buffalo Bills in 2018, he inherited a raw, erratic, young quarterback and one of the worst offenses in the league. By the time he left, the Bills were an offensive juggernaut and Josh Allen was an All-Pro and MVP runner-up.

That’s the primary reason the New York Giants hired him to be their head coach in 2022. They saw what he did for the Bills and their quarterback and believed he could do the same for them.

So far, they’ve turned out to be wrong.

Now, Daboll has one last chance to show them they were right.

How well the fourth-year Giants coach develops Jaxson Dart is the key to his future in New York, and possibly his future as a head coach anywhere in the NFL. The stakes are really that high after the Giants traded a third-round pick to get back into the first round and draft Dart at No. 25 overall, knowing that co-owner John Mara said finding a franchise quarterback was the "No. 1 issue" of the offseason. 

Now that they’ve got him, it’s up to Daboll to develop the Ole Miss star as well as he developed Allen seven years ago, only he has to do it under very different and admittedly "unique" circumstances. The 22-year-old Dart heads into the spring a deep third on the Giants’ depth chart behind two veteran quarterbacks who both expect to play. 

That means his time on the field will be limited, even in practice. But Daboll still has to get him ready to start by 2026, at the very least.

"Look, the process of developing a quarterback is just that," Daboll said. "We're going to do everything we can to develop him and bring him along."

No one doubts the Giants’ intentions, but the details of the process are going to matter more. Daboll has been notorious for giving