TRUE FANS ARE GONNA BE THERE
JPP to Giant faithful: Stay with us one more time
THE Giants’ misery in their Christmas Eve postgame Arizona locker room was palpable. This historically bad season, the first 13-loss campaign ever for the franchise, has worn them down. And they’re aware, with Sunday’s finale against Washington promising to be nothing more than a meaningless drag on New Year’s Eve, that MetLife Stadium could be taken over by the visiting teams’ fans again, as it was in Week 15 by the Philadelphia Eagles’ fans. Or even worse, it could be a ghost town. So for all of those reasons, an ornery Jason Pierre-Paul issued a challenge to Giants fans after Sunday’s 23-0 shutout loss to the Cardinals: If you’re a “true fan,” you’ll show up.
“Our fans are gonna be our fans. I feel like the true fans that’s really true to the New York Giants and organization and to the players, whoever they follow whatever, the true fans are gonna be there,” a fed-up Pierre-Paul said before flying home for two badly-needed days off. “You don’t know how the season’s gonna go when you start. Injuries occur, and at the end of the day the true fans are gonna be there supporting — in the cold, it’s gonna be freezing. We already know that.
“I know one thing for sure: my son will be there supporting me,” Pierre-Paul added. “So the real fans there, I know I got one person supporting me. And that’s all that matters.”
Coaches and players presumably find it as difficult to come to work during seasons this dreadful as fans find it to watch their team lose constantly. Steve Spagnuolo’s face after Sunday’s loss had the look of a man who knew falling to 0-3 as interim head coach gave him no chance of securing the full-time job.
Wide receiver Sterling Shepard insisted he and his teammates were in no way counting the days for this season simply to end.
“No,” Shepard said. “Everybody loves to play football, everybody loves doing this every week. I don’t think guys are just giving up waiting for the season to end. We love doing this. This is what we grew up doing. So I wouldn’t say that.”
Shepard did admit, though, that the Giants having 13 losses is incredible considering how he and so many others were thinking Super Bowl with this roster.
“I would have looked at them crazy (if someone had told me we’d lose 13 games, especially at the beginning of the season, going into the season,” Shepard said. “I thought we had the perfect squad to make a run at this thing. And the season’s just been frustrating.”
Shepard also acknowledged the disappointment perhaps was partially created and certainly compounded by the Giants buying into their own hype rather than just taking care of business from day one.
“I don’t feel like we listened to the hype, but I think it kind of creeped in a little bit,” Shepard said. “And you can’t listen to the outside stuff. You’ve just got to stay within the team and do it yourself.”
And for Eli Manning, even though all signs point to him returning in 2018 based on comments by him and John Mara, having a season this dreadful as he prepares to turn 37 on Jan. 3 is a waste of the valuable time he sees ticking away on his career.
“It’s been tough. I think probably for older players it’s tough to go through a season where you’ve been out of the playoffs for a while, and the team’s struggling, and you only have so many opportunities left,” Manning said.
At the very least, though, if the shorthanded and injury-riddled Giants are going to lose this final game, they at least want to do so with dignity. And they were embarrassed in Week 15 when Eagles fans took over MetLife Stadium and grew so loud in the fourth quarter that they forced a false start by Giants right tackle Bobby Hart because, Manning said, center Brett Jones couldn’t hear the snap count.
They then were embarrassed in a different and more familiar way on Sunday in Arizona, dominated by a middling opponent made to look elite going up against Big Blue. Cardinals players on both sides of the ball had their way.
And it won’t get any easier Sunday with Pro Bowl safety Landon Collins now out with a broken forearm, punctuating a season that went from bad, to worse, to terrible in part due to major injuries across the board.
Pierre-Paul was sensitive to the suggestion that the Giants’ lack of
“firepower” was a factor.
“What you mean firepower, man?” Pierre-Paul said. “We got guys playing football, you know what I mean? It’s an NFL team. Guys go down; others step up. That’s the way it is.”
The defensive end stressed, though, that the Giants are well aware they are 0-11 in the NFC and 0-5 in the NFC East and that they at least can wipe those winless streaks off the board by beating Washington.
“It’s in division and everybody knows we hate Washington,” Pierre-Paul said, trying to manufacture some hype.
The reality, though, is of course it is again better for the Giants to lose.
The Indianapolis Colts (3-12) play the Houston Texans at 1 p.m., the same start time as Giants-Washington. And the Giants (2-13) can secure the No. 2 overall pick in April’s B draft with a loss or a Colts win. ut if the Colts lose and the Giants win and they both finish with 3-13 records, the strength of schedule tiebreaker conceivably could bump the Giants down to the third overall pick. And wouldn’t that be a fitting end to this season: one more insult to send the Giants into 2018 on the low note they’ve struck consistently for four straight months.