Late flop flips hopeful say
Through 52 minutes and 22 seconds on Sunday, the Giants had shut down the Cowboys. They had forced two long missed field goals, making the game ugly, limiting the favorites to 263 yards of total offense.
Then, in the span of 4:41, it all came crashing down, a microcosm of this disastrous season. Once one thing went wrong, everything did.
Three possessions, three touchdowns, 189 yards allowed. One monster play after another. A tie game became 30-10 Cowboys, a promising result became a lopsided loss. Dak Prescott went from underwhelming to dominant.
“They made all their plays count,” cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie said. “They made it seem like they wanted it more. They outlasted us as far as mental toughness.”
“That happened quickly,” said safety Landon Collins, who suffered a sprained ankle in the defeat.
The first domino was a third-down conversion, a 54-yard pass from Prescott to Cole Beasley. He got away from Collins on the play, taking it all the way to the Giants’ 20-yard-line. On the next play, Prescott hit a wide-open Jason Witten on a 20-yard scoring strike.
After a Giants punt, Prescott went to work again, finding Rod Smith on an 81-yard touchdown pass over the middle, the running back easily beating linebacker Kelvin Sheppard on the short slant route, and speeding through the secondary. And after Eli Manning was picked off, Smith iced the victory, ripping off a 15-yard touchdown run in which he was untouched. A winnable game had become a blowout. “There is definitely something about that fourth quarter, man,” Rodgers-Cromartie said. “You fight hard for three quarters, and right when you think you got it, something goes wrong, and then something else goes wrong, and it just keeps going wrong. For it to be the 13th, 14th week of the season, we should already have [figured out] why that is happening, and we’re still searching for answers.”
Interim head coach and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo blamed himself for some of the miscues, saying they were bad calls that put players in poor position. Collins attributed the 180-degree turn in the Giants defense — from spectacular last year to dismal this year — to injuries.
But that doesn’t completely excuse the missed tackles or the blown assignments, allowing Prescott to throw for a seasonhigh 332 yards and three touchdowns. Or the previous 12 games when many of the same issues plagued the Giants defense, why they have become completely unglued after performing so well for such long stretches.
“We do have to figure out a way in the fourth quarter when it gets down to gutwrenching time to make a play or two,” Spagnuolo said.