Giants’ putrid offense looks incapable of winning without Jones
EAST RUTHERFORD » Here’s a running tally of what the Giants do well on a somewhat consistent basis this season: Clamp down defensively on opponents in the red zone. That is all. So, naturally, it was painful to watch this team slowly but surely fade Sunday afternoon at MetLife Stadium in its 21-6 loss to the Cowboys.
The gist of this one is that the odds were heavily stacked against the Giants before the opening kick with a backup quarterback taking on a division leader with gamewrecking pass rushers. To their credit, the Giants tried a ground and pound attack against the Cowboys’ susceptible interior.
And while that helped early on with 11 carries for 68 yards in the first quarter, the bottom line just keeps coming back to haunt the Giants.
They simply are not disciplined enough or schematically good enough to sustain methodical drives and score points.
With Daniel Jones under center, this offense is a bad unit. Without him, it looks simply incapable of winning a game.
“We’ll have to take a look at the film,” quarterback Mike Glennon said. “I felt like we ran the ball pretty well. Just self-inflicted wounds. There were a couple times we did move the ball well and then just ended up with field goals, and then a couple of kind of dumb decisions on my end forcing the ball that were not good decisions.”
In arguably the most embarrassing effort of the season, the Giants somehow managed to outdo their own ineptitude.
After getting the ball back with 1:39 left in the second quarter, the Giants, trailing
12-3, were deliberately trying to avoid a turnover and failed. Two screens and a run from their 40 resulted in Saquon Barkley’s first-ever loss fumble (791st touch from scrimmage). That set up another Cowboys field goal and extended the Giants’ pathetic score against opponents inside the two-minute warning in the first half this season to 65-0.
“Dallas had timeouts, so you want to get the ball rolling at that point. You want to get the clock moving and not turn and put yourself in a position where the other team can just go ahead and get the ball back and finish the half with the ball in their hands,” head coach Joe Judge said, and obviously the bad turnover negated that thought process.
On the Giants’ first drive of the second half, a 32-yard run
by Devontae Booker on fourthand-1 combined with a Dallas unnecessary roughness penalty moved the ball to the 20yard line. But the Giants committed a holding penalty on their first play in the red zone and never recovered, settling for a hopeless field that trimmed their insurmountable deficit to 15-6.
And maybe the most laughable sequence of all: Down 21-6 with 9:28 remaining, the Giants lined up to go for it on fourth-and-1 from their own 28 and committed a false start.
At least Riley Dixon punted the ball for a rock solid 51 yards!
“Everyone is upset that we lost; that’s a pivotal play in the game that we’ve got to convert to give us a chance to win the game,” said Barkley, who appeared visibly frustrated at
that point. “We’ve just got to execute, and we didn’t do that on that play and other plays. We’ve got to be better. I could be better for myself, two-minute (warning) having a fumble. Can’t have that happen. That’s unacceptable.”
Six points were a season low for the Giants, who have a measly 22 offensive touchdowns in 14 games — the second-fewest ahead of only the Texans. It’s never a good sign when your kicker has accounted for 40.3 percent of your offense (96 of the 238 points), but that’s where we are with this franchise.
Even with Jones sidelined by a neck injury, it’s unconscionable for an offense to be this bad with a healthy Barkley, Kenny Golladay, Evan Engram, Darius Slayton and Sterling Shepard (who left late with a torn Achilles) in the lineup.
Glennon looks completely out of sync with his receivers as he tossed another three interceptions. Two came in the fourth quarter. One happened from Dallas’ 27-yard line after a Cowboys fumble, when a touchdown could’ve brought the Giants within one score.
Third-stringer Jake Fromm, a University of Georgia product, probably should have been in the game at that point for experience. He finally entered for one drive with 3:41 left and completed six passes for 82 yards.
“We got to a point in the game, I want to see what Jake can do — point blank,” said Judge, who left the door open for Fromm to start next week against the Eagles. “We weren’t doing enough moving the ball otherwise, so I wanted to make sure I had a chance to go ahead and see Jake and that’ll obviously open up the conversation of what we’re going to do this week. We’ll talk about it as a staff. I’ll make the best decision for the team.”
The reality is that it really doesn’t matter who suits up for this team to finish out the 2021 season. This is a broken product regardless — the offense was a joke even with Jones — and it will soon to be time to blow up the roster again.
Let this sink in: The Giants have now posted five straight losing seasons and their seventh in eight years.
In the entire 95 years that the team has been in existence, it never had more than three straight 10-loss seasons (1978-80).
And if Jones doesn’t return for the last three games, the Giants are staring at the prospect of 13 losses for the second time in five years.