Big Blue View
The New York Giants entered Sunday’s season-opener full of high hopes. They were full of good vibes, sort of like this:
Then, the Washington Commanders handed the Giants a 21-6 beat down that, while Giants head coach Brian Daboll would disagree, was not as close as the final score indicated. From a Giants’ perspective, it looked a lot like this:
From the looks on their faces, the sounds of their voices and the words they were choosing in the post-game locker room Sunday night, you could easily tell that, while they wouldn’t say it, Giants players who have been through this before were feeling like this:
All of that optimism is a thing of the past. Vanished. A memory. A summer fling that was never meant to last.
The Giants have 16 more of these beatings — err, games — on their schedule. Much has been made by the media — the Giants themselves have turned a deaf ear to questions about it — of the Giants starting 0-2 or worse in six of their last eight seasons.
Daboll has only been part of four of those. Dexter Lawrence and Darius Slayton, the longest-tenured Giants, have been around for six of those. Few players have been part of more than one or two of those.
After six years with the Giants, Slayton was a free agent in the offseason. He looked tired and defeated at the end of last season, ready for a fresh start in a new place. In the end, he chose to come back and try to get it right with the only team he has ever played for.
After Sunday’s game Slayton was somber.
“Definitely wasn’t how we wanted to start the year, for sure,” he said.
Avoiding the type of performance they had on Sunday was precisely why Daboll was asked so many times during training camp, several of those times by Big Blue View, about making changes geared toward improving the chance of being ready Week 1. Whatever the Giants did, it clearly did not work.
How do the Giants not let Sunday’s awful start spiral into something much, much worse? Something Giants fans know too many of their seasons have become since the 2011 Super Bowl?
That was Lawrence in a quiet post-game locker room Sunday as afternoon turned to evening.
Is it simple, though? If it was simple wouldn’t the Giants, with a full, high-pressure offseason and on field practice that began way back in April, have fixed it already?
If it was simple, wouldn’t the Giants have figured out a way not to become the first NFL team in more than 80 years to be so offensively inept in Week 1 that they haven’t scored a touchdown in a season-opener in three years?
In their most embarrassing sequence on Sunday, the Giants ran seven plays after getting a first-and-goal at the 8-yard line, three after being gifted first-and-goal at...
