It’s wrong for Giants to be this bad for this long
Because of preseason expectations, the team the Giants are playing on Sunday has been a bigger disappointment than the Giants have been. But despite all the problems the Bears have had, starting with Mitchell Trubisky, they’re still favored to win. They obviously need the game, too, as they try to salvage some respectability, and maybe save the jobs of their coach and the general manager who traded up to draft Trubisky and not Patrick Mahomes. But if you are a Giants fan, you believe, and righteously, that your team needs it even more. You hope that this is the Sunday when your team starts looking like more than one of the worst teams in the world.
The Jets have shown some fight in their own lost season the last couple of weeks, even if they have done it against the bottom of the NFC East. The Giants need to do the same. Starting now. Maybe John Mara has already decided that his general manager, Dave Gettleman, and Coach Pat Shurmur are safe, even if November and December cave in on the Giants again. Maybe John Mara doesn’t want to start all over again, so soon after Ben McAdoo and then Jerry Reese were asked to leave the building. But if all that is true, you have to wonder why, especially going off what we saw last season and what we have seen this season on the way to six straight losses and 2-8.
For now, there are two teams in the NFL that are hands-down worse: Bengals, Washington. Of course the Giants have been going with a rookie quarterback, Daniel Jones, for a couple of months now. You remember what it was like around here when Jones came off the bench and brought the Giants back against the Bucs. The only question seemed to be what size yellow jacket he’d need someday in Canton. Now, in the middle of November, Jones is doing what a lot of rookie quarterbacks have done before him: Show flashes of brilliance around turning the ball over. He may turn out to be a star. Or not.
And the Giants sure have Saquon Barkley, the secondyear running back they took in the 2018 draft instead of Sam Darnold. Barkley got hurt, came back, and the last time he played he gained one more rushing yard in 13 carries than you or me got that day against the Jets. So this has been as much a lost season for him – to here – as it has been for the team that his talent was supposed to transform. Maybe this is the day he shows up in a big way, even against the Bears defense, and runs away from everybody and makes Giants fans think that he might be the kind of rare great running back who can run his team all the way to a Lombardi Trophy.
Maybe things will look a little better after the Bears game. Maybe they will show up. For now, though, the 2019 Giants fit a description of the Knicks that Charles Barkley offered the other day: After you get past the kid at quarterback and the running back from Penn State, they are just a collection of guys. It is why the years since the team’s last Super Bowl victory over the Patriots are starting to look and feel a lot like the 1970s in New Jersey. They come into their 11th game of this season with as many victories as the Dolphins, who seemed to have spent most of the season trying to lose.
What’s the Giants’ excuse for what we’ve seen from them so far? You have to say this: It’s now officially become impossible to blame everything on Eli Manning, who has watched the last part of what should have been his prime ruined by the organizational dysfunction since the Giants beat the Patriots in Indy.
There are 32 teams in the NFL. Only two have given up more points than the 289 the Giants have allowed so far: Bucs, Dolphins. The Bucs, on average, have given up 31.3 points per game. The Dolphins, 30.5. The Giants? They’re up next, giving up 28.9 points per. Through 10 games, the Giants have somehow managed to give up 36 more points than the Washington football team, which you could swear sometimes is owned by James Dolan and not Daniel Snyder.
We hear a lot about the mess that Gettleman inherited, on the field and in the locker room. But somebody explain to me who or what has been stopping Gettleman from assembling a more professional defense than this? Once, great Giants teams were built around defense, all the way back to Lawrence Taylor. You tell me when you see that happening again anytime