Big Blue View
The New York Giants will emerge from their long-awaited bye week to take on a reeling divisional foe in the Washington Commanders.
Neither team is where they expected to be at this point in the season. Prior to the season, Washington was hoping to build on Jayden Daniels’ meteoric rookie season and their NFC Championship appearance. The Giants, meanwhile, were expecting a bevy of defensive investments to pay off while rookie Jaxson Dart developed.
Now, the Giants are 2-11 while the Commanders are 3-10 and dwelling in the cellar of the NFC.
The Commanders are familiar foes for the Giants as NFC East rivals, and we have a pretty good idea of what the Washington offense wants to do, and how they’ll go about it. That familiarity usually makes for some competitive games between division rivals.
This game, however, there are some bigger overarching questions for both the Giants’ defense and the Washington offense.
Let’s take a closer look at those questions as we get ready for Sunday’s game.
The Giants’ defense has been, in a single word, putrid this year. Their pass defense has been better than their run defense, but that’s a low bar to cross. Just about every starter except Brian Burns and Cor’Dale Flott either regressed in Shane Bowen’s second year as defensive coordinator. Some may have expected a defensive turnaround when Bowen was fired after the Giants’ overtime loss to the Detroit Lions, but that was never really going to happen.
We did see some changes in how interim defensive coordinator Charlie Bullen called the Giants’ defense, with more aggressive and creative blitz schemes against the Patriots.
The larger problem seems to be systemic and that needs more than a change in play caller to rectify. It takes time to fix the underlying system and for those changes to breed results. The Giants were never going to get that kind of time mid-season, but we’ll at least get to see this week if the pause and another week of practice leads to tangible results on the field.
We heard prior to the game against the Patriots that Bullen was concentrating on more fundamentals during practice. That’s something the Giants should have been emphasizing from OTAs onward, but hopefully we’ll get to see some sort of progress on that front. If a different mid-week process leads to better attention to detail, communication, and faster downhill play in the final four games, it’s a good sign for the off-season. That could show that coaching was the problem, not the talent in-house, and getting the coaching hire right could unleash the talent in 2026.
The other side of the bye week coin is on the injury front. The Giants’ defense was beat up over the month of November, losing Kayvon Thibodeaux, Paulson Adebo, Jevon Holland, Tyler Nubin, Deonte Banks,...
