Big Blue View
I should know better than to predict the New York Giants to win any game. Occasionally, like last week, I get burned for picking their opponent to win. Most of the time, though, you can’t go wrong picking against them. That’s one general thing I learned from the Giants’ awful 26-14 loss to the New Orleans Saints. Let’s look at a few specific things that we learned, though.
In my lukewarm prediction that the Giants would win today, one of my reservations was:
My big question is, how are the Giants going to score points, in this game and beyond, with Malik Nabers out?
At first, it seemed that my worries were misplaced. The Giants not only scored, they scored touchdowns (for future reference, since you may not see many, those are plays in which a member of the offense possesses the ball in the opponent’s end zone). In fact, they scored touchdowns on their first two drives, while limiting the Saints to a field goal. Miss Malik Nabers? No problem. Run a two-tight end offense with Theo Johnson and Daniel Bellinger, and sometimes even a three-tight end offense. Jaxson Dart was connecting with both of them, Cam Skattebo was shedding tacklers, the Saints were blitzing (five times in the first quarter) with no discernable effect on Dart, and the vision was starting to enter my brain: Get the Saints to respect the tight ends and the running game, and then Dart could start to pick his spots with the Nabers-less wide receiver group to hit some big plays and deliver the knockout punch. With a 14-3 lead it was all coming together.
Then it stopped. The Saints responded to what the Giants were doing and forced Dart to pass to someone other than the tight ends, and that was the end of that. After the 12:54 mark of the second quarter, the Giants did not score another point. Dart blew his chance for a big gain, probably a TD, by being too late and too short on a flea flicker to Darius Slayton, allowing defensive back Terrell Burgess to knock the ball away. Slayton later fumbled on a hit by Saints’ linebacker Demario Davis, and eventually left the game with an injury. Wan’Dale Robinson had five catches but for only 30 yards, Jalin Hyatt showed once again that he cannot get open vs. NFL defensive backs and can’t win contested catches, and Beaux Collins did have one catch but in general found out that catching preseason moon balls against Jets’ defensive backs is not the same as making catches against first-teamers when the games count. It wasn’t quite as bad as the 2023 Giants-Jets game when Brian Daboll wouldn’t even let Tommy DeVito throw a pass, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.
I’ve been against the idea of bringing back 32-year-old Odell Beckham Jr., who is nowhere near the receiver he was when the Giants traded...
