The Giants’ season is over. Really, I knew it was over after the Week 2 loss in Dallas, but then the Giants sucked me back in with their Week 3 win in Houston, and the NFC East sucked me back in by letting the Giants hang around until Thursday night. Now I can finally give up on the 2018 New York Giants because there’s no coming back from the 34-13 loss to the Eagles. At 1-5, the Giants’ season is officially over.
I thought this year might be different. A new general manager and a new head coach gave me promise that last year’s 3-13 debacle wasn’t indicative of who the Giants really were. Coming off an 11-5 season and a postseason appearance, it was easy to blame injuries and the head coach for 2017. However, the 11-5 record in 2016 wasn’t indicative of who the Giants are. That season was the anomaly, not last. The Giants are still losing the team that got Tom Coughlin fired and the losing team that led to Ben McAdoo and Jerry Reese being so lost that they decided to bench Eli Manning for Geno Smith. The Giants flat-out suck, and I’m a fool for thinking this season would be different, and I’m an even bigger fool for thinking they would show up and save their season on Thursday night after the way they played through the first five games.
When the opening kickoff was fumbled by the Giants, I laughed. When it was reversed thanks to the ground causing the fumble, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Two plays later, when Manning tried to force a pass into a non-existent window to the third-string tight end and it was intercepted, I knew where the game was headed. But like a fool, I stuck around and wasted the next three hours of my life even though I knew the Giants were going to lose.
There really wasn’t much to the game. The Giants were outplayed and dominated by a much better team and a team that should have never been only a 1-point favorite against such an inferior opponent. The Eagles were are in another class when it comes to comparing them to the Giants, and traveling to MetLife off a disappointing home loss on a short week proved how much better they are than the Giants.
The game was over the second Manning forced that pass to the worst possible pass-catching option on the field. The rest of the game was just a formality to improve the Eagles to 3-3 and get them back on track, but I stuck around and watched.
I watched Manning dump off passes to Saquon Barkley as he feared for his life with the worst offensive line in the league protecting him. I watched Barkley be the only positive player yet again in yet another Giants loss. I watched Odell Beckham leave the field for the locker room despite the Giants being on offense with two seconds left in the first half as if the team had once again let him down. I watched Beckham freak out on the sideline after a big Barkley play as he tried to draw the cameras to him since he wasn’t doing anything in the actual game worthy of attention. I watched Aldrick Rosas miss a field goal near the end of the first half when the Giants couldn’t afford his first missed field goal of the season. I watched the defense once again hide behind the inconsistent play of the offense even though the Giants defense is every bit as bad as the Giants offense. And I watch Pat Shurmur look clueless once again on the sideline as his record as a head coach fell to 11-28.
It’s hard to believe that Shurmur is the right man to lead the Giants in the near future. When his team isn’t blowing winnable games or losing in the final seconds, they aren’t showing up. With the season on the line, you would think you would get the best possible effort, and if they were to lose to the defending Super Bowl champions, so be it. Instead, the Giants put together their worst effort of the season in the biggest game of the season. The home team on Thursday Night Football is supposed to have an unfair advantage with the short week, unless it’s the Giants. There is no advantage when it comes to the Giants.
I’m tired of hearing about the Giants and their history, but right now, that’s all the organization has: history. The Giants have been a bad team for a long time now, and there are no signs that’s going to change anytime soon. It’s certainly not going to change this season.
Whether it’s the actual play in the games or the antics on the sideline or the $95 million wide receiver giving outrageous interviews, in which he isn’t sure if he likes playing for the Giants, there’s nothing to like about the Giants. Nothing. They are a losing team full of losers who have never accomplished or won anything in their careers outside of the starting quarterback, whose fault these last few seasons seems to be.
The more the Giants lose, the more my dislike for Beckham grows. Up until last week, I had defended Beckham against the critics because of his talent and his abilities, but I jumped off the bandwagon at the perfect time heading into the Carolina game. When you look at a team like the Eagles, they don’t have a Beckham. He has more talent than all of their wide receivers put together, and probably more than all of their wide receivers, tight ends and running backs put together. The Eagles are a reminder that you don’t need a big-name wide receiver to win in this league. You need an offensive line and a pass rush, and when $95 million is tied up on a wide receiver, it’s hard to have either of those two things. The Giants were coming off a losing season, in which they started the year 0-6, before Beckham arrived, and since he has arrived, they have had one winning season and played in one playoff game, a game in which it was his drops that ended the Giants’ season. The Giants are a losing team with or without Beckham.
That’s not to say that the Giants’ problems are solely on Beckham, he’s just one of the problems, and he’s a big problem, from both a financial standpoint and a locker-room standpoint. This Giants team was built on the idea that they were more like the 11-5 team in 2016 and not like the 3-13 team in 2017, though it’s obvious they the front office was fooled like many Giants fans and that this team more closely resembles last season’s debacle. Ownership gave the green light to build for 2018 with a win-now mentality and it has backfired remarkably in that the Giants are nowhere near contending and they’re also not rebuilding. They are stuck in the middle, and that’s the worst place to be. For an ownership group that let Coughlin go for McAdoo and agreed with McAdoo to bench Manning for Smith, only turning on McAdoo once the backlash from the fan base and media grew to be too much, it’s no surprise they were wrong about how to handle this season.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Cowboys and Redskins both lost this week and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Giants went to Atlanta on Monday night in Week 7 and beat the Falcons and then beat the Redskins at home in Week 8 headingin into their bye week with people believing they could go on some sort of second-half run. But I won’t be one of those people. I have seen enough and I won’t be sucked back in again. I’m done with the 2018 New York Football Giants.
Last modified: Jul 23, 2023
