PAUSE FOR EFFECT
Bye week a perfect time to reflect on Giants' unlikely, riveting season
SURELY the Giants’ players have enjoyed this week off, and will happily watch on television as most of their fellow players beat each other up Sunday and Monday while they’re sinking into their La-Z-Boys or settling into a hot tub to ease their aching bones.
Surely the Giants’ coaches will appreciate the relatively light week; no opponent Sunday means no need to take to the office couches as much, no need to obsess about X’s and O’s and coverages and blocking patters and pass routes, and they’ll be enjoying a long weekend.
The bye week, eight games in, came at a perfect time for the Giants.
But, damn, it came at a lousy time for the rest of us.
Because the Giants have spent the first eight weeks of the season reminding us of all the good stuff we can sometimes find in sports when the stars align and the coaches know what they’re doing and the players play with ferocity and the scoreboard mostly complies with our fondest wishes.
(The Jets, in fairness, have done their share of that, too, but the Jets have the Bills this weekend and, let’s face it, by 4 o’clock or so Sunday we may REALLY see what a team in need of a bye week looks like.)
The last month has been a bit of a firestorm around here, maybe you’ve noticed. The Mets and the Yankees ended seasons of intense promise and hope in the throes of bitter disappointment, and their fans have been force-fed an Astros-Phillies World Series straight out of the third circle of Hell. The Knicks have lately looked like a duplicate copy from any of the disappointing seasons out of the last 22 or so. The Nets? Yeah. The Nets have been the anti-Giants, underachieving and all but daring their fans to stay interested while they merrily pour kerosene on the team logo day after day after day after day.
But the Giants have been different. Oh, the Devils and Islanders are both on nice winning streaks now, and the Rangers are talented enough that they’ll pile up plenty of points, but hockey season is still in its infancy. As Charles Barley once famously said: “Early in the season, teams that suck don’t know that they suck yet.”
But this is eight games with the Giants — traditionally the midway point of an NFL season, and even in a 17-game schedule still far enough along to not be suckered in by small sample sizes. The Giants are 6-2. Better, they are the best kind of 6-2: few of their fans saw this coming, little was expected of them, and yet they’ve overperformed and overdelivered with a roster stuffed with players who are difficult — if not impossible — to dislike.
And now, they have paused. Good for them. Not so much for the rest of us.
“At this point in time during the season, I think ev- eryone’s tired, coaching-wise. Everybody’s sore, playing-wise,” Giants head coach Brian Daboll said Monday. “It’s just the nature of this league, and you just keep on pushing through. I think you need to try to take advantage of a little bit of downtime to recuperate, to get some rest and to come back fresh and ready to go for us this last half of the season where we have our bye.”
Soon enough, the teeth of the season will be upon them and we will see with clear eyes how good the Giants really are. But first there will be home games against Houston and Detroit, and a genuine opportunity to be 8-2 before the schedule gets a tad meaner.
It is one of the more endearing characteristics of this team so far that while we’re allowed to speculate about what’s to come, they have all bought into living in the moment, and understanding there’s more to getting where they’ve gotten than sheer happenstance.
“I think we’re all excited,” quarterback Daniel Jones said earlier this week. “It’s been fun to win, it’s been fun to play well, and pull out some of these games down the stretch. We appreciate the position we’re in, we’re enjoying that but there’s a lot of work to do.”
There is, and it will be fun to see how that work pays off, and where things will shake out the next time the Giants earn a breather. That’ll either be the end of the season or — if things are really destined to follow a storybook path — the week after the season ends, with a bye earned as the No. 1 seed in the East.
No, that isn’t likely and, no, it’s probably not feasible.
But nine weeks ago, would 6-2 seemed likely? Or feasible?