Ugly may be beautiful
Why early chaos and sloppiness of the NFL season may play to the Giants’ benefit
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Football is back.
Quality football? That may take a little more time to arrive.
It’s become an annual tradition to lament the sloppy play that often marks the first few weeks of each new season. Even with full training camps, weeks of preseason games, and functioning offseason programs — elements that have been pushed to the side this spring and summer — teams often stumble through the opening stages of this 17-week production.
“When you watch NFL football in September, regardless of the year, you see a degree of bad football out there on the field,” Giants coach Joe Judge said this week. “Turnovers, penalties, some mental errors — you see some things within the flow and the operation of the game that isn’t the way it looks later in the season. That’s just the truth of the National Football League every year . . . in September, you always see your share of bad football as it turns up on tape.”
It stands to reason 2020 will provide even more of it. Heck, it might even help a team like the Giants in the first few games of their schedule.
Just as snow, rain, wind and other variables can often serve to create chaos and thereby level the playing field when otherwise unbalanced teams face each other, the element of anarchy that comes from disheveled play might allow the Giants to upset a team that
appears much better on paper. A team like, say, the Steelers on Monday night.
The first four weeks of the Giants’ schedule features them Pittsburgh, the Bears, and then the last two NFC representatives in the Super Bowl, the 49ers and Rams. Having a chance to play thembefore any findtheir midseason groove certainly seems as if it could be beneficial.
Not everyone thinks that way. It’s easy to say that the upheaval of the preseason and offseason will benefit the status quo.
“If I were looking to handicap this, I would say jump on the veteran quarterback and the veteran coach who have been together,” Hall of Fame coach and NBC analyst Tony Dungy said on Tuesday. “I think they’re going to
have the advantage in September and early in the season.”
Fellow NBC analyst Chris Simmsagreed, noting that “proven commodities” should prevail.
“I expect teams like the 49ers and the Saints and the Chiefs and the Ravens and even the Packers and Seahawks to get off to a good start because it’s very close to the team they ended with last year,” Simms said. “They know what to expect with each other. They’re not learning a new playbook. ... Teams that had a lot of change in the offseason, newcoaching staffs, accumulated a lot of players? Man.”
But if any of the established teams on the Giants’ schedule the first few weeks are impacted and slowed by the restrictions of the pandemic, they could be ripe for a surprise loss.