Don’t draft a quarterback.

I will be repeating that phrase to myself when “THE PICK IS IN” graphic appears on the bottom of the TV for the Giants sometime before 9 p.m. on Thursday night.

There’s no franchise-changing quarterback in this draft outside of Kyler Murray, who I still can’t believe gave up on a career in Major League Baseball and a reported additional $14 million to focus on football. Even when it comes to Murray, no one knows how his game will translate from college to the NFL given his stature, and as a Giants fan, it doesn’t matter how it will translate because the Giants don’t have the option of selecting him without making a Kevin Costner in Draft Day-esque move up to acquire the first overall pick.

The Giants will pick at 6 and 17 in the first round and I don’t think they use either pick on a quarterback. I don’t think they should use any of their 12 picks in the draft on a quarterback.

The Giants need to build a team, and I mean an actual team. Right now, the Giants have very few NFL-worthy starters in their expected 2019 lineup on either side of the ball. They need to enhance both lines, somehow create a pass rush and construct a secondary. A rookie quarterback won’t help them do any of those things, and using a high pick on a quarterback won’t do the team or the player any good when there isn’t a line to protect him when he inevitably plays. Wasting a pick, especially one in the first few rounds on a quarterback who may or may not be a capable starter in the NFL is a gamble and risk not worth taking. Not this year at least.

Last year at the draft, there was the notion the Giants should pick their next quarterback with the No. 2 pick in the draft under the premise they wouldn’t be picking at or near the top of the draft again for a very long time. That very long time became the very next season and this draft. The Giants chose to not select the heir to Eli Manning a year ago, but that doesn’t mean they now have to select him this year.

I’m always a Giants optimist in the offseason and right up until kickoff in Week 1, before the Giants remind me and every other fan why they are the most frustrating team in the league. But even as an offseason optimist, I don’t see how the Giants aren’t going to be picking even higher in 2020 than they are in 2019. Aside from the four division games against the Cowboys and Eagles, the Giants will also play the NFC North and AFC East, and I don’t know where anyone is confidently finding four or five wins in their 2019 schedule, let alone the six they recorded this past season. The 2019 Giants might make me yearn for the days of the 2017 and 2018 Giants.

The Giants don’t need a quarterback right now. As the President of the Eli Manning Fan Club, I realize that last sentence seems both biased and ridiculous, but it’s true. The Giants don’t need a quarterback for 2019. They might need one in 2020 and will probably need one in 2021, but there’s no one worth selecting and wasting a season mentoring in this year’s draft. Next year’s draft is when they should go after a franchise signal caller.

When the Giants go on the clock for the first time on Thursday night, I will keep repeating that phrase, praying my plan will be heard by the Giants.

Don’t draft a quarterback.

I’m an idiot. I believed Pat Shurmur and Dave Gettleman were going to fix the 3-13 mess Ben McAdoo and Jerry Reese left them. I believed this Giants team was a playoff team.

The Giants were far from a playoff team. Even if they still had a less-than-one-percent chance at 5-8 before losing to the Titans to finally mathematically eliminate them, the Giants were never close to being a playoff team this season, and I wish I had known better. After all these years, I should have known better. You can change the general manager and the head coach and the offensive live and trade away underachievers on defense, but you can’t change the Giants. And whenever the organization decides to move away from Eli Manning, that won’t change anything either.

Back on Sept. 7, I wrote “New-Look Giants Have Me Optimistic” and that headline now reads as a joke. Let’s go back through my words from before the season and see what went wrong.

I enter every Giants season the same way: thinking they will win the Super Bowl. I realize it’s not a smart approach to set my expectations for the season at a championship, considering I root for a franchise that despite its four Super Bowl wins in the last 31 years has given its fan base a lot of regular-season disappointment. It’s also not the best idea to think an ownership group that interviewed Ben McAdoo and then named him head coach after speaking with him and then let him bench Eli Manning for Geno Smith has now put the team in proper hands moving forward. But the same way I’m dumb enough to bet on the Giants nearly every week, I’m dumb enough to think they can win the Super Bowl this season.

I was smart enough to know that my expectations for the Giants weren’t realistic since the worst time to be a Giants fan is when the team has positive expectations surrounding them. It’s not until their season is in peril and they are barely hanging on that they are their best. Yes, I was dumb enough to think this Giants would be a playoff team let alone a potential Super Bowl contender the same way I was to think an ownership group that hired Ben McAdoo would hire the right man for the job this time. I would say there’s a better chance that a year from now Shurmur will be looking for a new job than there is that the 2019 Giants will be a playoff team.

I realize success is fleeting in the NFL, but I have a hard time believing the Giants could be an 11-win team in 2016 and the only team to beat the Cowboys in that regular season, which they did twice, and then become a three-win team overnight. Maybe the eight wins by a touchdown or less in 2016 were a sign that the team just had some breaks go their way in a way they never did near the end of Tom Coughlin era, but winning one-possession games is the way to win in the NFL.

I wasn’t the only one fooled by the Giants as many other Giants fans thought 2018 would be more like 2016 and that 2017 was a fluke. Instead, it was 2016 that was the fluke. All of those close games that went the Giants’ way once again didn’t go their way this season and it left them with a 5-11 record. Outside of the Redskins game in which they sent Mark Sanchez back to being a backup quarterback, the other four Giants wins were like nearly every other win of theirs in my lifetime: a nail-biter. I don’t expect the Giants to become a team that consistently wins by two or more possessions, so that means they are going to have to figure out how to win close games again as soon as possible. And that’s going to mean rebuilding a defense that is guaranteed to allow a field goal when winning by three or less or a touchdown when winning by four to six in the final minutes of play.

It’s felt like two years since I watched any Giants football that has mattered. Last season was over in Week 3 when they lost to the eventual champion Eagles on a last-second field goal to fall to 0-3. Two weeks later, they were still winless, and a month after that, they were 1-8. It was the most miserable Giants season of my life and for many Giants fans lives, all culminating with the decision to bench Manning for no reason. But looking back, had McAdoo and Reese not decided to bench Manning and handle it the way they did, maybe the Giants win a few games down the stretch and they are both still in their old jobs for the 2018 season. It’s possible that the two idiots needed to make the worst decision in the history of the Giants to avoid Giants fans going through another season with them in charge.

This Giants season felt over when Dak Prescott hit Tavon Austin for the long touchdown in the first minute-plus in Week 2. I didn’t expect the Giants to beat the Texans in Week 3, and they nearly blew the lead in that game, before holding on to give the season meaning once again. But that meaning didn’t last long as the Giants went on to lose their next four games, and at 1-7, they had to run the table to reach the playoffs.

Losing has become synonymous with the Giants as they have fallen from the NFL’s elite to basically become the Browns of the NFC. I’m sure if you asked ownership if they regret their decision to move on from Tom Coughlin they would tell you they do. And if they were to say anything different, they would be lying.

Now it’s Pat Gettleman and Pat Shurmur and I don’t know what to expect. Everything about the way the Giants have planned for this season makes you think they are a playoff team. Factor in the potential Super Bowl hangover of the Eagles, the illogical roster decisions of the Cowboys and the unknown with the Redskins and it’s very easy to see how the Giants could return to the playoffs in 2018, and quite possibly as the NFC East winner. The only thing standing in their way is their schedule.

The Giants planned for the 2018 as if they were going to win the division. They just forgot to rebuild the offensive line and create any semblance of a pass rush prior to the start of the season. The decisions by Gettleman and Shurmur made everyone think the Giants were going to have a big year, but their poor decisions only served as an idiotic mirage for the same problems from 2017.

Normally, when you finish last in your division, you have a path to the playoffs paved for you the following season. Not for the 2018 Giants though. The first seven weeks of the Giants’ season are as hard as any ever with games against the Jaguars, Cowboys, Texans, Saints, Panthers, Eagles and Falcons. Throw in what is always a challenging division game against the Redskins in Week 8 and it’s an absolute gauntlet for the Giants until their bye week. I know it’s not about who you play in the NFL, but when you play them, but as of now, the Giants are going to have to be at least 3-4 in those first seven and 4-4 after Week 8 to have a chance at returning to the postseason. And they are going to have to start hot with a new head coach, a new offensive line and a defense that doesn’t have one true pass rusher on it. The more I write, the more I’m talking myself out of the previous paragraph and the Giants being a playoff team.

That paragraph alone should have been enough to help me realize the Giants were never going to be a winning team in 2018. I wrote those words and I still went against my own thoughts and planned on having the Giants playing in the playoffs this coming weekend. Needing to be at least 3-4 in the first seven games, the Giants ended up going 1-7. That’s as Giants as it gets.

But for now, I’m optimistic. That’s right, I’m optimistic about not only the New York Football Giants, which is as ridiculous as it gets, but I’m optimistic about a Giants team that has a new head coach, a new offensive line and pass rush-less defense coming off a three-win season. I don’t know how long this optimism will last (probably until the first delay of game by the offense, or draw play on third-and-19 or holding penalty by the offensive line or first down allowed by the defense on third-and-21), but I think it will last longer than it did a year ago. It better.

The new head coach proved to be the same as the old head coach. The new offensive line was the same as the old offensive line with a few players in different spots. The pass rush-less defense was as pass rush-less as any defense in history. The three-win season felt a lot like this five-win season. I did get a longer meaningful season that last, but that’s not saying much.

I’m sure next September I will talk myself into the Giants once again being a playoff team and maybe even a Super Bowl team. Hopefully, I’m smart enough to remember everything I just wrote.

The 2018 New York Giants season is over. After weeks and weeks of talking myself into the chance of them miracuously getting into the playoffs, it’s over. The Giants can’t reach the playoffs this season. It’s something we have known since their Week 2 disaster in Dallas, but now it’s official.

What better way for this awful season to end than for the Giants to get shutout at home with Eli Manning and the offensive line playing as bad as they had all season, Odell Beckham not playing at all, the defense unable to make a big spot or avoid a careless third-down penalty and Pat Shurmur coaching his team out of the game and using all of his challenges anyone could finish their first beer. With the Giants clinging to a far-fetched playoff berth, they lost 17-0. It’s nearly impossible to not score in the NFL in 2018, but the Giants did it … at home.

I spent a lot of time watching, writing, reading and listening about the 2018 Giants and a lot of money wagering on (and mostly losing) on them as well. It’s time and money I won’t get back as a season with so much promised ended up just being a continuation of the three-win season of a year ago. The offensive line was as bad and possibly even worse, Manning was as inconsistent, Beckham was as much of a jerk, the defense was as unreliable and Shurmur and Dave Gettleman might as well have been Ben McAdoo and Jerry Reese.

Giants fans were made to believe that this team was capable of contention and that 2017 was a fluke and not 2016. In reality, 2016 was the fluke, as the Giants’ 11 regular-season wins were a product of the low-scoring, one-possession wins they have been on the wrong side of many times over the last two seasons.

Sure, every team’s season can come down to a few plays. For the Giants, it was the crushing loss to the Panthers in Week 5, in which they lost on a 63-yard field goal as time expired, and the Week 13 letdown against the Eagles when they had 19-3 halftime lead, but failed to put the game away. There were other missed opportunities against the Jaguars and Cowboys and Redskins, but those two games were the difference in the season. Turn those two losses into wins and the Giants are 7-7 right now, and a pair of wins in their final two games from a winning season and a potential postseason berth. Instead, they are 5-9 and eliminated and most likely going to get blown out by the Colts and then play in front of a Cowboys crowd at MetLife in the season finale.

The season went south before it even began when in the offseason the Giants thought they could fix the offensive line by placing a few patches on a boat that had been taking on water for a long time. Instead of getting a whole new bought, the Giants tried to repair the poorly-made piece of crap that could barely stay afloat the last two seasons. The offense was able to produce and put up points once the line was just bad and not a complete embarrassment, but the changes came too late, and asking a team to climb out of a 1-7 hole and finish the season on an eight-game winning streak after winning just four of their last 24 regular-season games was ridiculous.

Now there is no reason to watch another second of Giants football this season. They have already wasted enough of Giants fans time this season and last season that watching just to watch isn’t even close to a good enough reason.

Shurmur will try his best to win the last two games and avoid a 5-11 or 6-10 season in what is his second and last chance as a head coach in the league. Manning will try his best to prove that he should be given one more season in 2019 to get the team back in the playoffs and back to where they should have and could have been many times in recent years. Beckham will probably sit out again now that there is truly no reason to play. As for the rest of the team … who cares?

The once-proud Giants are now 8-22 in the last two seasons and 19-27 in the three regular seasons since Tom Coughlin was shown the door. They have played one playoff game in the post-Coughlin era, a game in which only the quarterback showed up to play, and they were routed. The team is now much closer to being the Jets or the Browns than they are to being champions again. I would like to think that will change in 2019, but it would be foolish to think it will.

I keep thinking about the moment right before Graham Gano kicked a 63-yard game-winning field goal against the Giants back in Week 5.

As Gano lined up, I had a sick feeling in my stomach. The chances of winning were in favor of the Giants as Gano would need to drill a field goal a yard shot of the all-time record, but as a Giants fan, I knew that math and science and odds and probability could be thrown out the window. When you’re dealing with the New York Football Giants, especially during the Eli Manning era (it’s sad I can’t refer to it anymore as the Tom Coughlin era anymore), there’s no statistical information that could discount the team involved.

Part of me thought maybe the kick would sail to the right or left and miss the uprights or fall short of crossbar, or maybe just maybe the Giants might even block it and never let it get to that point. But the Giants fan in me knew what was going to happen the moment Ron Rivera decided against a Hail Mary pass and opted to try to a field-goal attempt from the other side of the 50.

That 63-yard field goal essentially ended the Giants season. Sure, at 1-4 they could still go an a ridiculous 9-2 run and win 10 games or possibly get a playoff spot with an 8-3 finish if things broke right. But the Giants had given away four of their first five games of the season and for a team that had was now 4-17 since the start of 2017, only an idiot could envision them win eight or nine of their last 11 games.

Then at 4-7 and holding on to their dwindling postseason odds, the Giants took a 19-3 lead over the Eagles to halftime. Missed opportunities, turnovers, bad play calls and poor in-game management prevented the 16-point lead from being even bigger and putting the game out of reach in the first half. Sure enough, in the second half, the Giants went away from everything that got them their two-possession lead, and they eventually lost.

Now the Giants are a disappointing 5-8 when they could have easily been 7-6, but even at three games under .500 they are somehow still mathematically alive for a playoff berth. Five things need to happen in the final three weeks of the season for the Giants to reach the playoffs:

1. Giants win out
2. Vikings lose two of three
3. Panthers lose two of three
4. Eagles lose two of three
5. Packers lose one of three

That might seem like a lot of things that have to happen, and it is, but that’s what happens when you’re 5-8 and trying to reach the playoffs: a lot of shit has to go your way. Let’s break down each of the five steps to see if there’s any reason to even root for what is being considered a less-than-one percent chance of the Giants reaching the playoffs.

1. Giants win out
The Giants are home this week against the 7-6 Titans who are playing for their own postseason life. The Titans will be well rest after playing at home on Thursday Night Football in Week 14 and will have more than two days of extra rest than the Giants. The Titans are a great home team (5-1), but a bad road team (2-5) and their defense won’t exactly be seeing the Cody Kessler-led Jaguars offense this week.

The Giants go on the road to play the Colts in Week 16. This will be the hardest of their last three games to win, considering the currently 7-6 Colts will be playing for a postseason berth and have gone 6-1 since their 1-5 start with the return of Andrew Luck and a revamped and at-times dominant offensive line.

In the season finale, the Giants host the Cowboys. By this time, the Cowboys will have wrapped up the division and if the way they handled the final weeks of the season with the division clinched two years ago is any indication, the Giants can expect to see the Cowboys starters for very minimal time.

It’s easy to see the Giants winning this week, considering they are 3-point home favorites, and in Week 17 where the Cowboys will have nothing to play for. They will need to pull off an upset on the road in Week 16, however, for this whole plan to work.

2. Vikings lose two of three
A long time ago, this would have seemed impossible. But a long time ago, the Vikings were legitimate Super Bowl contenders. Now they are playing to hold on to the 6-seed and go on the road to Chicago — where they already lost this season — in the first round. Kirk Cousins has destroyed the Vikings offense and his embarrassing play has now reached the coaching staff and the loss of his offensive coordinator’s job. An all-time collapse by this Vikings team could lead to Mike Zimmer being fired and even Rick Spielman as this team hosted the NFC Championship Game a year ago and then handed out an $84 million contract to a bad quarterback, which has set the team back substantially.

The Vikings host the Dolphins this week, and after the Dolphins saved their season with a miracle play last week, these two teams are headed in opposite directions. Then the Vikings go to Detroit in Week 15 where better teams than the Vikings have lost this season, and then they finish at home against the Bears in Week 17, in what could be the first of back-to-back week matchups with the two division rivals.

3. Panthers lose two of three
The Panthers are in the middle of their own collapse like the Vikings as the two playoff teams from a year ago have left the door open for the Giants. The Panthers were 6-2 a little over a month ago and now they are 6-7 after five straight losses, including the last two to the Buccaneers and Browns.

The Panthers host the Saints this week and go to New Orleans in Week 17. Sandwiched between their two games with the current NFC No. 1 seed (who will surely want to hold on to that spot and avoid going to Los Angeles for the NFC Championship) is a home game against the Falcons, who have nothing to play for other than to save their head coach’s job. I’m not sure if the Falcons want to save his job (I wouldn’t), but he will be coaching to save his job and that will mean pulling out all the stops to improve his record.

4. Eagles lose two of three
It’s understandable for the Eagles to have a letdown year following the team’s first-ever Super Bowl win. And after last week’s crushing overtime loss in Dallas, which all but took the Eagles out of contention for the division, it would be easy to see them pack it in and lay down over the last three weeks.

The Eagles are going to win in Week 17 in D.C. because right now the Redskins are the worst team in football with a combination of Mark Sanchez and Josh Johnson at quarterback. That means they need to lose their other two games, which are at the Rams and at home against the Texans. The Rams’ disgusting play in Chicago last week all but guarantees a win this week and the Texans’ need to fend off the Colts and Titans in the AFC South race and secure their own playoff berth ensures the Texans will come to play in Week 16.

5. Packers lose two of three
The Packers could very well lose to the Bears this week (I think they will) and clinch their role in helping the Giants reach the playoffs. But if the Bears lose at home this week, the Giants would need the Jets or Lions to step up in the next two weeks to complete the plan.

If I had to rank in order from the most likely to happen to the least likely to happen of these five things, I would rank them:

1. Panthers lose two of three.
2. Eagles lose two of three.
3. Packers lose one of three.
4. Giants win out.
5. Vikings lose two of three.

If the Giants don’t reach the postseason and miss out by one game, you can think back to the Gano field goal. And if they miss it by two games, just remember the 19-3 halftime lead over the Eagles that was eventually blown.

The rest of the NFC gave the Giants countless chances to save their season and they never took advantage of it. They have one last chance, but they need a miracle.

The Giants won’t lose this week. That’s not a bold prediction or and it’s not me thinking a team with one win this season and four wins since the start of last season is going to win a game, rather it’s simply a fact. The Giants won’t lose this week because they aren’t playing.

This week will be what it feels like if the Giants seized to exist and I’m guessing it will feel really good. There won’t be disappointment or frustration or heartbreak or anger. There won’t be Eli Manning having less than a second to release the ball and there won’t be Manning getting knocked into next week when the offensive line has yet another breakdown. There won’t be Saquon Barkley having nowhere to go five yards behind the line of scrimmage or the constant one-yard checkdowns to the team’s best player. There won’t be Odell Beckham having a huge game statistically in a loss then calling out his team as if he’s not part of the problem. There won’t be Sterling Shepard or Evan Engram having drops at big moments in the game. There won’t be the defense bending and not breaking all game until the final minutes when it looks like the Giants might come back. There won’t be Pat Shurmur having no idea what to do when his team gets into the red zone or calling for unwinnable challenges or giving up points for fourth-down attempts. There won’t be any of the nonsense that has gone on for the last 24 games, which has caused me to wonder if the New York Football Giants are now the Cleveland Browns.

Here are the worst teams in the league since the start of last season by record and win percentage:

Browns 2-21-1 (.104)
Giants 4-20 (.167)
49ers 7-17 (.292)
Colts 7-17 (.292)
Raiders 7-16 (.304)
Broncos 8-16 (.333)
Jets 8-16 (.333)

The Giants might not be exactly the Browns, but they are pretty freakin’ close. The Browns have one more win and a tie than the Giants this season and no other team in the league is close to the two over the last season and a half. The teams after the Giants in those standings are either rebuilding, playing a rookie quarterback or recently won a Super Bowl and have a grace period. The Giants don’t fall into any of those three categories. They are just a bad team headed for the top of the draft despite not being in rebuilding mode. The Giants continue to be a losing team with no plan in place to restore winning.

This season was supposed to be different. A new general manager and a new coach and a new offensive line were supposed to remove the bad taste that Jerry Reese, Ben McAdoo and the 2017 season left in Giants fans mouths. But this season has been worse. The 2017 Giants could use the injury excuse as Manning was throwing to no-name receivers for most of the season and the defense was missing big names a majority of the time. The 2018 Giants? They have been mostly healthy, have had Beckham and Shepard all season and added Barkley. Yet somehow they are worse than the team which won three games a year ago. I didn’t think that was possible.

I felt good about the Giants this season, and in Week 1, despite the loss, I came away with the positive idea that a three-win team from a year ago could go toe-to-toe with the AFC runner-up. After Week 2, I was demoralized, and could see the Giants’ season spiraling out of control. The loss in Dallas was the single-worst performance I had maybe ever seen by a Giants team in my lifetime and the team was once again 0-2 with their season on life support.

Week 3 provided an unfavorable matchup against a quarterback who can run and a pass rush that hadn’t displayed their abilities, but the Giants magically came out of Houston with a win. The feelings after the Dallas loss had been erased and chalked up as a bad performance and I could see the Giants going on a run. Instead, they gave away another winnable game, this time at home against the Saints to fall to 1-3. It was a disheartening loss, but the season could still be saved.

Then in Week 5, the Giants pulled off a late-game comeback to take a one-point lead on the Panthers. As I started to think about the weeks ahead and planning the Giants’ path to winning the NFC East, Graham Gano drilled a game-winning 63-yard field goal as time expired. It was as crushing as any regular-season loss could be, but the rest of the division was letting the Giants hang around at 1-4 and a Thursday night home game against the Eagles could put the Giants one game back in the sloppy NFC East.

Normally, the home team has an incredible advantage for the short-week Thursday game. Not the Giants. The Giants were flat-out embarrassed at home, losing by three touchdowns, and finally showing even the most optimistic Giants fans that this season is just a continuation of last. The Giants had 11 days until their next game, which gave them just enough time to come up with a new and different way to lose a game, and against a Falcons team, which can’t stop anyone, the Giants scored three points in the first half and six points through three quarters. Then this past week, the Giants scored three points in the first half at home against the Redskins and still had only three points on the board through three quarters.

I’m not sure people understand how incredible it is to be held to three points in a half in an NFL game in 2018. The league has done everything it can to increase scoring and essentially make it impossible to play defense and the Giants still can’t score. The Giants have been held scoreless in eight of the 32 quarters (25 percent) they have played. They have scored three points or less in 12 of 32 quarters  (38 percent) and have seven points or less at halftime in six of their eight games (75 percent). Most of their scoring has come in the fourth quarter with the game already out of hand and the opposition trading yards for time on the clock. The only time the Giants have had more than 16 points after three quarters was in their Week 3 win in Houston when they had 20. Their point totals through three quarters in their games: 9, 3, 20, 10, 16, 13, 6, 3.

I’m not sure where the Giants go from here. Ideally, they would use their near-top-of-the-draft pick on either a quarterback or offensive lineman and the following picks on those same things. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that will happen with a front office that saw the 2017 Giants and their 3-13 record and thought they could be a playoff team in 2018 with the addition of a running back and a rookie offensive lineman and without a pass rush.

It’s depressing to realize the next meaningful Giants game will be Week 1 next September, nearly 10 months away. While nearly the rest of the league and the rest of fans have a reason to get excited for Sunday (or Monday or Thursday), I’m relegated to gambling and fantasy with no real football to care about. It’s not a place I thought I would be in when the season began, but it’s a place I have grown accustomed to as a Giants fan.