Big Blue View
Entering Sunday’s game against the New Orleans Saints, there was an air of optimism around the New York Giants. A feeling that maybe, just maybe, things were starting to FINALLY turn toward brighter days.
The Giants defeated the previously unbeaten Los Angeles Chargers in Week 4. They got a winning effort from Jaxson Dart, a rookie first-round pick who is the next great hope to become the franchise quarterback they have been in need of. The pass rush was dominant against the Chargers. Cam Skattebo looked like the kind of back with attitude the Giants have not seen since the heyday of Brandon Jacobs.
The Giants had hope. Hope that they could end the day on a winning streak for the first time in two years. Hope that a brighter day had arrived.
The Giants took all that hope, all those good vibes and flushed them on Sunday in an awful 26-14 loss to the New Orleans Saints.
The Giants fumbled some of that optimism away. They threw some of it away. They took whatever was left of it after the fumbles and interceptions and torched it with penalties, drops and other assorted mistakes.
This was a game the Giants should have won. Clearly. They had a 14-3 lead and it looked like the good times were rolling. Then, they took the victory they had in hand, put it in a nice box, wrapped it with some pretty paper, put a bow on it, walked it across the field and gifted it to a previously winless Saints team.
They also pretty much wrecked any chance their season had of not resembling something like the 3-14 disaster that nearly got head coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen fired a year ago.
The Giants turned the ball over on five straight possessions. Per the CBS broadcast, they are the first team to accomplish that ignominious feat since the Jets did it NINE years ago. They had eight penalties for 95 yards. They had drops. They had missed opportunities.
“We had a lot of opportunities where we were moving the ball down the field and we would hurt ourselves,” Dart said. “We just gave the game away with all the turnovers.
“The whole game we moved the ball, we had turnovers. There weren’t many times where we got
stopped, we were really good in the open field, we just turned the ball over.”
The Saints made one nice play, an 87-yard touchdown pass from Spencer Rattler to Rashid Shaheed. For the most part, the Giants gave them everything else. Here is a look at how the Giants’ mistakes changed the outcome:
Here is another way to look at it:
