The Giants Released An Official Statement Regarding The Claims By Brian Flores That The Giants Had Already Decided On Hiring Brian Daboll Before Interviewing Flores

Brian Flores has raised serious issues in the filing of his complaint. The specific claims against the Giants and Mr. Flores' allegations about the legitimacy of his candidacy for our head coach position are disturbing and simply false.

After we interviewed six exceptional and diverse candidates, the decision on who we would hire as head coach was made on the evening of January 28, one day after Mr. Flores spent an entire day in our offices going through his second interview for the position, meeting with ownership and other staff members, and receiving a tour of our facility. (See the itinerary below). There is additional concrete and objective evidence to substantiate we did not make our decision until the evening of the 28th.

The allegation that the Giants' decision had been made prior to Friday evening, January 28, is false. And to base that allegation on a text exchange with Bill Belichick in which he ultimately states that he "thinks" Brian Daboll would get the job is irresponsible. The text exchange occurred the day before Coach Daboll's in-person interview even took place. Giants' ownership would never hire a head coach based only on a 20-minute zoom interview, which is all that Mr. Daboll had at that point.

In addition, Mr. Belichick does not speak for and has no affiliation with the Giants. Mr. Belichick's text exchange provides no insight into what actually transpired during our head coaching search.

It has been well documented how much research and due diligence we did on Mr. Flores as it related to his candidacy. John Mara called Mr. Flores two days after he was dismissed in Miami. Mr. Mara expressed to Mr. Flores in that January 12 call that once we had our new general manager in place, we would begin the process of hiring our head coach and we wanted to meet with Mr. Flores because we considered him a serious candidate for the position. Mr. Mara and Mr. Flores then had their first formal conversation in a 25-30 minute zoom call on January 18 (at Mr. Flores' request) to further discuss his candidacy.

In between those initial conversations and Mr. Flores' in-person interview on January 27, there were several other communications between Mr. Flores and members of our organization. This included a dinner with our newly hired general manager, Joe Schoen, the night before Mr. Flores's in-person interview. The consensus from within the Giants organization after this dinner remained that Mr. Flores was an outstanding candidate, and we looked forward to sitting down with him in person the next day.

Our hiring process and, most certainly, our consideration of Mr. Flores was serious and genuine. We are disappointed to learn that Mr. Flores was under the mistaken impression the job had already been awarded.

In his CBS interview yesterday, Mr. Flores was asked if "clubs have the right to hire the person they think is the best qualified for the job or the person they feel is right for them?" Mr. Flores responded "They do. That's very reasonable to me . . .". That is exactly what we did.

We hired Brian Daboll as our head coach at the conclusion of an open and thorough interview process. No decision was made, and no job offer was extended, until the evening of January 28, a full day after Mr. Flores' in-person interview and day-long visit to the Giants.

Brian Flores Interview Itinerary – Head Football Coach

January 27, 2022

8:45am – arrival at Quest (Joe Schoen)

9:00am – meet w/ John Mara, Chris Mara, Steve Tisch, & Joe Schoen

12:00pm – Lunch / Facility Tour – Tim McDonnell

1:00pm – Pat Hanlon/Jen Escalante/Dion Dargin

1:45pm – Ronnie Barnes/Jessie Armstead

2:30pm – Allison Stangeby/Pete Guelli

3:30pm – Joe Schoen

Well that was most certainly is a thorough statement on a serious subject, as the helmet picture would lead you to believe. 

This may shock you guys, but I'm nowhere near as plugged into NFL circles as Bill Belichick is. I can confirm any report once it has been tweeted by two NFL insiders since the second tweet technically confirms the first. But that's about it. So if Bill Belichick heard that an NFL team was definitely hiring someone, he likely will know it before I do.

All I can say from the numerous Giants beat writers I follow said that Brian Daboll was the favorite thanks to his time with Joe Schoen with the Bills however Flores was very much in the mix all the way until the end, which has been reiterated after these accusations came out. I'm not sure what BB heard before he sent a text to the wrong Brian in his phone. But unless it was something concrete from someone that actually had intimate knowledge of who the Giants were hiring from one of the big guns in the franchise, he was taking educated guesses like everyone else.

Now if it can be proven that the Giants did violate the Rooney Rule, they should be punished for it and those punishments would be severe. The Giants have been a shitshow of a franchise for a while now but they've never been accused of anything like this and their timeline seems to support their claims along with Tiki Barber going to bat for the Mara family in an extremely emotional moment on the radio.

As of now, we have two sides that are dug in on their stories before the NFL investigates. However like most things NFL related, I'm not sure how much digging Goodell & Co. will do into these allegations considering they said an entire 58 page PDF was without merit less than two hours after it was released.

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Regardless of what happens, I think this week has proven that while the Rooney Rule may have been a good start to get more minorities into the head coaching chair of an NFL team. However, Mike Tomlin being the only African American head coach in a league with 58% African American players shows there is still a good amount of work that can be done on that front.