Big Blue View
The new, supposedly improved, New York Giants sure looked a lot like the old, inept New York Giants while losing to the Washington Commanders 21-6 on Sunday in their season-opener.
Remember all that fun they had in the preseason? The good vibes and optimism all of that generated?
Poof! Gone.
They looked like the same old — losing — Giants.
It was a season-opener, so of course the Giants’ offense slumbered through it.
The Giants have now scored 12 points COMBINED in their last three season openers. That is a level of unfathomable futility in modern-day football. It is the first time that has happened since the early 1940s.
The Giants, in fact, have never scored a touchdown in the first half of any of the four season openers in the Daboll era. They have six first-half points TOTAL in openers against the Tennessee Titans, Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings and Commanders.
“I’m focused on this year,” Daboll said. “Just didn’t do a good enough job.
“Collectively, we all have to do better.”
The quarterback play was not the biggest, or the only, problem. But, it wasn’t nearly good enough.
Didn’t we say that about Daniel Jones for years? He was never the only problem, he was just never good enough to overcome all of the other problems.
Well, Russell Wilson was not the reason the Giants lost on Sunday. He wasn’t good, though. Certainly not good enough to overcome poor offensive line play, the lack of a running game, too few open receivers and a defense that played hard but couldn’t get key stops or come up with game-changing takeaways.
That is familiar ground, as well.
It left Daboll fumbling for answers about what the Giants will do at quarterback going forward with first-round pick Jaxson Dart waiting in the wings. Daboll may not have meant to, but he clearly opened the door to replacing Wilson with Dart.
“I mean, we’re just right here after the game,” Daboll said. “”I got confidence in Russell , so we’re going to go back, we’ll evaluate the tape. This game isn’t on Russell Wilson. It’s not on Russell Wilson. Want to make that clear. I have confidence in Russell. We got to do a better job all the way around.”
When it comes to improving an offense that ranked 31st in the NFL last season, the Giants put all their eggs in the quarterback basket. The only significant change they made was to revamp their quarterback room completely, adding veterans Wilson and Jameis Winston and trading up to draft Dart as their quarterback of the future.
On Sunday, that paid no dividends.
“I think the game was simple in the sense that we didn’t convert in the red zone,” Wilson said. “We had two chances down in the red zone to make it a close game, a really close game. The game was close all the way
throughout the whole game, really, to be honest with you. I thought our defense did a...
