Big Blue View
Training camp for the New York Giants is roughly three weeks away. Players report on Tuesday, July 28, with the first practice at The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia set for Wednesday, July 29.
Each day between now and the beginning of training camp, Big Blue View will feature some form of training camp preview content. That will include posts on positional analysis, storylines, roster battles, and more. We start today with a look at fair expectations for the 2026 season.
FanDuel lists the 2026 over/under for the Giants at 7.5 wins in John Harbaugh’s first season as head coach. The over is +100, with the under -120.
Giants fans are optimistic. In a poll here at Big Blue View, 63% of voters said the team would win seven to nine games. Another 19% said the team would win 10 or more games. That is a lot of faith in a team that won just seven games total the past two seasons.
BBV’s Chris Pflum came up with a 10-7 prediction in the immediate aftermath of the schedule release.
My prediction, admittedly the most optimistic prediction I could make, was 9-8.
In 18 seasons as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, Harbaugh’s teams reached the playoffs 12 times. There were only three losing seasons. Only one of those seasons, a 5-11 2015 season, produced fewer than eight wins. There was a Super Bowl title in 2012.
Granted, Harbaugh stepped into a situation in 2008 with an established general manager in Ozzie Newsome and a team thought to be among the league’s best-run organizations. The Ravens, though, experienced more consistent success after hiring Harbaugh than they had before.
The Giants have gone 7-27 (.206 winning percentage) the past two seasons and 13-38 (.255) the past three seasons. In the last nine seasons, the Giants have had eight losing years. In six of those nine seasons, the Giants have won fewer than six games.
It is hard to imagine a team coached by Harbaugh regularly being that abysmal.
“The plan is to win every game,” Harbaugh said at his introductory press conference. “You go into every game planning to win that game. That’s our expectation. That’s what we will be expecting to do. But we’ve got to earn the right to expect that by how we go to work and prepare and what kind of a team that we make ourselves into.”
The New England Patriots went 4-13 in 2023, Bill Belichick’s final season. They again went 4-13 in 2024, Jerod Mayo’s only season as head coach.
In 2025, New England hired Mike Vrabel, a veteran head coach with a winning pedigree. They featured a highly drafted second-year quarterback. They re-made their roster and restored a winning culture. The Patriots went a stunning 14-3 and represented the AFC in the Super Bowl.
There are Giants-Patriots parallels, obviously. Multiple horrible seasons in a row. The hiring of Harbaugh, a...
