FOXBOROUGH, Mass.
At least the Giants came out of Monday night’s dismantling by the Patriots with a very clear answer to one of the many questions they will face in the coming weeks and months.
Mike Kafka? He ain’t it.
He’s not alone, of course. There are plenty of people who had a hand in this 33-15 loss to the Patriots at Gillette Stadium who won’t be back next season. Right now the entire team has an “interim” label. That’s what happens when you lose seven straight and fall to 2-11.
But it was the optics and the way in which the team was run over in this game that should end the idea of Kafka coming back as the head coach next season. That plus the apparent lack of control — and answers — when it comes to handling the two most prized possessions the Giants have right now: Jaxson Dart and Abdul Carter.
When he replaced the fired Brian Daboll last month, he had a seven-game opportunity to prove himself at least worthy of consideration. He lost his first two games at the helm but had a backup quarterback and a bad defensive coordinator and a long list of other excuses.
On Monday night, Dart was back on the field. Charlie Bullen, Kafka’s hand-picked successor to replace Shane Bowen, was on the headset calling the defense. And the results were . . . worse.
The Giants were outclassed in every aspect, outplayed at nearly every position and beaten up throughout the game. It was as if the Patriots were mugging the Giants to steal one or both of the Super Bowl rings they felt they deserved from their meetings in the previous decade. The whole world had a good laugh at the Giants’ expense.
In a season of epic losses, most of them in games in which they competed and often led but suffered fourth-quarter collapses, this game stood out as the Giants’ worst end-to-end performance. They came out flat and uninspired and embarrassed themselves.
When the team’s kicker chunks his foot into the turf on a critical field-goal attempt and never even makes contact with the ball to forfeit what little momentum the Giants could muster in the second quarter and it is the third-most-talked about part of the game, things are plummeting fast.
“Today wasn’t our best effort, it wasn’t our best game here in a minute,” Kafka said. “It wasn’t a great team effort.”
And so this referendum on Kafka has been decided. Someone from outside the building will be coaching the Giants in 2026. Kafka will finish the last four games after the bye this coming week and maybe even scratch out a win or two among them, but it’ll be too late for him. The disarray and lack of heart in this game was too hard to ignore. The Giants must move on.
Kafka isn’t necessarily the problem, mind you, but he has shown he is not the solution, either. The way this game started out and then spun away from him demonstrated that.
It began with one of their first-round picks unable to get out of bounds and the other unable to get on the field.
Dart, back from a concussion, tried to tiptoe down the sideline on a first-quarter scramble and was smashed by linebacker Christian Elliss so hard that he went tumbling upside down. Dart popped up, but it was clear that whatever coaching the Giants had tried to instill about avoiding hits and sliding and playing safer football had not stuck.
After the game, Dart was defiant about his style of play. He said he wouldn’t have done anything different on the run in which he got walloped.
“This is football,” he said. “I’m going to get hit . . . We’re not playing soccer out there.”
Meanwhile, Carter was benched for the first quarter, the second time since Kafka came into this job that he’s been disciplined with the loss of playing time for breaking team rules. Kafka wouldn’t say what he did and Carter said: “[Expletive] happens.”
Carter did say he let his team down, and by the time he came onto the field, the Giants were behind 17-0. But shrugging off whatever he did to deserve the benching with curse words probably isn’t the tack the Giants want to see or hear from him right now.
Dart and Carter will be back next year. They might learn from this season and this night. There are coaches and veterans in their ears who are practically begging them to change their course before they do irreparable harm to their bodies or their reputations. They might yet be salvaged.
It’s too late to save Kafka, though.
He has a lot of the attributes franchises look for. He’s a former player, he comes from a strong tree that includes Andy Reid as a mentor and he has plenty of smarts. He probably has some very good ideas on how to run a team, and if he had an offseason to implement his culture rather than the few days in which he needed to do so on the fly during this waste of a season, they might actually work out.
He might even be a fine head coach someday.
It just can’t be with the Giants. Not now. Not after this.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday’s Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
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