Shurmur believes in Big Blue

Pat Shumur was disappointed like everyone else in blue. Naturally, he wanted his first game as head coach of the Giants to be a victory. But he wasn’t going to let one loss change how he feels about the Giants.

The first-year head coach saw a lot of winning qualities in his first game that gave him reason to believe victories are coming soon.

“The one good thing is our team fought from the front to the back,” Shumur said following Big Blue’s 20-15 loss to the Jaguars at MetLife Stadium on Sunday afternoon. “They fought all the way through the game. Unfortunately, as is the case in a lot of these games that are close, we just didn’t make enough plays in the end to win the game.

“We battled a really good defense. You’re looking at a top-10 defense and we battled them and I thought they fought throughout the game. We can probably all point to individual bad plays by everyone, me included, so I feel like they battled and we’ve just got to go back and correct the mistakes that maybe showed up and get ready to play Dallas.”

But what pleased Shurmur in defeat is how his players responded against a team that came within one win of last year’s Super Bowl. When the Jaguars went up 13-3 in the first half, the Giants responded immediately with a field goal, and the defense didn’t allow any more points. After the Manning interception was returned 32 yards to the house by Myles Jack, pushing the lead to 20-9 with 11:24 remaining, Saquon Barkley answered with a 68-yard touchdown run to make it a game again. Kaelin Clay’s muffed punt with 45 seconds left negated one last chance for Manning and the offense.

“I told the players that the important part of this game, that we can work with, is they hung together. They played hard from the first snap to the last. We just didn’t make enough plays in the end to win this game, especially a one-score game throughout,” Shurmur said.