Sloppy mistakes don’t go unnoticed
At the beginning of training camp, the Giants sported matching T-shirts with the phrase “All Ball” written across the back, alluding to the team’s message of always taking care of the football.
Giants coach Pat Shurmur, however, said his team didn’t honor that mantra in their 32-13 victory over the Bears on Friday night.
“We did a lot of things well. We improved a lot of the things that were a focal point last week, but some things popped up that we need to correct,” Shurmur said on a conference call Saturday afternoon. “I thought we were loose with the football. We dropped a punt, we had a chance at an interception which we didn’t get, we did cause a couple of fumbles, which was good, but on the flip side, Daniel Jones had two fumbles, Rod Smith had one, we had three drops and then Eli [Manning] had a little exchange problem.
“That was not up to our standards. Those are all correctable, every one of those, and those are the things that we will continue to focus on as we go through camp. It’s all about the ball, and we need to go a better job at securing it.”
The Giants finished with four fumbles (losing two of them) and one interception, from quarterback Alex Tanney in the third quarter. Shurmur wouldn’t go as far to describe his team’s play as sloppy, but he sees the mistakes as easily correctable ones that will come with more reps.
Neither the Bears’ starting defense nor their offense played a single snap in Friday’s game, but Shurmur said it wasn’t discussed with his team beforehand and he doesn’t “really care who they play.”
“I don’t know, I guess you could say at least for the first quarter, maybe one way or the other, you may learn a thing or two more, but for most of the game, a lot of the players we were looking at, we were playing twos versus twos,” Shurmur said of how he evaluated his team given the matchup. “So, I don’t know, I would imagine maybe a little bit. It’s one of those things, it didn’t happen, so what are you going to do about it? That’s sort of the way I look at it.”