Mike Kafka will once again be calling offensive plays for the Giants in 2025. Head coach Brian Daboll revealed that his offensive coordinator will return to his role as offensive play-caller, per Dan Duggan of The Athletic.
“Mike’s done a great job this preseason. He’s done a good job with the staff,” Daboll said (via ESPN’s Jordan Raanan). “Got a lot of confidence in Mike and the offensive staff. Up to this point, relative to all the preseason games and the meetings we’ve had, I’ve been very pleased with the offensive staff.”
After working his way up the coaching ranks in Kansas City, Kafka joined Daboll’s new staff as offensive coordinator in 2022. After impressing during his first preseason at the helm, Kafka was handed the reins to the offense by his boss. He spent two years handling the offensive play calling while also garnering some head coaching interest.
After finishing as a middle-of-the-road offense in 2022, the Giants had one of the league’s worst offensive showings in 2023. This led Daboll to strip Kafka of his play-calling duties several times towards the latter part of that season, according to Raanan. With “noticeable discontent” on offense, Daboll decided to take over full-time play-calling duties for the 2024 season.
The offense didn’t show much progress with the head coach running the show, and Giants owner John Mara hinted that the team considered pivoting back to Kafka the moment the 2024 campaign came to an end.
“Maybe [Daboll] makes some other changes in the way he operates going forward. I talked to him about, ‘Do you really believe that it’s in our best interest for you to continue calling the plays?’” Mara said (via Raanan). “I said, ‘I’m not going to demand that you do one thing or the other. But are you better off letting somebody else call the plays?’”
There will be one major difference this time around. As Duggan notes, Kafka will call the plays on the sideline, just as he had done throughout the 2025 preseason. During his first three seasons as offensive coordinator, Kafka had been in the booth.
“It was good to be on the sideline,” Kafka said (via Raanan). “It’s always to be right there with the players and see it eye to eye and communicate with them more directly. You can do certain elements of that up in the box. But there’s really no substitute for being on the field.
“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. Guys obviously operate a bunch of different ways. So I thought it was cool. It was fun.”
The team’s QB grouping stayed somewhat consistent through the coaching staff’s first three seasons, but with the Giants adding both veteran Russell Wilson and first-round QB Jaxson Dart, it seems they want to optimize their offensive approach ahead of a critical 2025 season.