Tiki Barber thinks there’s a “little bitch” in the Giants locker room.
The former Giants star lambasted the unnamed player who told ESPN how fired ex-Giants coach Brian Daboll allegedly berated and threatened to strip interim coach and then-offensive coordinator Mike Kafka of his play-calling duties after tight end Theo Johnson dropped a third-down pass vs. the Eagles earlier this season.
The Giants denied the report to the outlet.
“I don’t know what that does for the player, other than make you look like a little bitch,” Barber said on his WFAN show on Thursday. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? How he handles his emotions with another coach has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Now, if it’s a player who’s talking about him talking a certain way to a player, I get it. But that doesn’t make any sense to me, why a player would release that and make it feel like — What’s the benefit?”
Now that the Giants have opted for a new direction, plenty of pieces have emerged dissecting what went wrong for Big Blue under Daboll.
Changes open the door for disgruntled players or sources to vent, and co-host Evan Roberts noted that the player who divulged this purported story probably did not like Daboll and has no use for him.
Barber replied: “Who was it? Somebody who’s not playing.”
Roberts later said that no matter how many outbursts Daboll had over the years, the Giants didn’t fire him specifically for that reason.
They axed him since he went 20-40-1 over three-plus seasons, including 11-33 since making the playoffs in his first year guiding the team in 2022.
However, those explosions can grind on players when the losing piles up like it did for the Giants in recent years.
“You could argue that the reason that they didn’t communicate well enough is because he was always screaming and yelling,” Barber said. “I’m saying always, that’s only because that’s how it was presented, but I don’t know if that was the case. He would scream and yell at the referees for sure, we should see that on gameday. We would see him every now and again scream at a player or a coach because of a mistake that happened on gameday, but it’s not like he was screaming and yelling 60 minutes out of 60 minutes.
“He’s gone. Why crap on a guy when he’s gone? It’s petty.”
Sunday will mark the Giants’ first game without Daboll, which usually makes for an interesting watch to see if the players offer a more inspiring effort than they in the previous coach’s final days.
One could argue that the Giants gave it their all under Daboll, which indicates they liked him, but late-game defensive failures and questionable coaching decisions doomed the team and his regime.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
