Big Blue View
The New York Giants very nearly came up with a win for the ages against the Dallas Cowboys.
Russell Wilson turned back the clock to 2017 with one of the finest performances of his career. He completed 73 percent of his passes for 450 yards and 3 touchdowns, averaging 11.0 yards per attempt. It was almost the same as his Week 8 win over the Texans, when he threw 452 yards and 4 touchdowns, averaging 11.0 yards per attempt, but only completing 63.4 percent of his passes.
The Giants scored 37 points and had nearly as many explosive plays on this one game than they’ve had in while seasons over the last several years.
And yet, it wasn’t quite enough.
It wasn’t quite enough because all Dallas needed was 20 yards to be in Brandon Aubrey’s range to tie the game and send it to overtime.
There has already been plenty of argument over the Giants defense in the final 20 seconds of the game. There will be plenty more to come, unless the defense takes a step forward in the coming weeks. But to put the situation in a bit of perspective, being within three or fewer points is even more favorable for Dallas than college overtime rules. For those who don’t know, college teams the ball at their opponents’ 25-yard line — 5 yards further from scoring than the Cowboys are on their own 35 after a touchback.
The view here is that the answer isn’t what defense to play, but rather forcing the Cowboys to score a touchdown. In other words, they needed to be up by at least four points after the Nabers touchdown, not three.
And on that front, we have to talk about the Giants issues in the red zone.
It isn’t that the Giants can’t move the ball, they’ve been able to do that reasonably well so far. They’ve had 7 trips to the red zone over the first two weeks of the season, running 29 plays inside of their opponents’ 20-yard lines. Unfortunately, those 7 trips have only resulted in 18 points: four field goals, a touchdown, and two turnovers on downs.
It felt as though the Giants should have gone into the locker room with a 28-10 lead at halftime against the Cowboys instead of a paltry 13-10 lead.
Unfortunately, a series of failures and breakdowns hampered the Giants on almost every play when they were in scoring position.
The most obvious culprit has been the Giants’ blocking. Wilson was under pressure on 50 percent of his pass attempts inside of the 20-yard line, though that improved slightly from Week 1 to Week 2.
To be fair to the Giants’ blocking, those were two of the more (or most, even) egregious failures. Not every protection failure was that bad, or was on the right side of the line. However, they did often muddy Russell Wilson’s reads over the middle, force him to accelerate his process, or force him to roll out...
