Big Blue View
Maybe by the end of the first month of the season or so
This time of year, when little of consequence is happening in the NFL that we on the outside can see, reporters, analysts, and fans are nonetheless trying to gauge the prospects of teams for the upcoming season. Russell Wilson seems to be exciting Jalin Hyatt and Darius Slayton with his penchant for the deep ball. Abdul Carter looks like the real deal. Jaxson Dart has been uneven but Brian Daboll seems excited about his progress. Maybe Evan Neal can be salvaged by a move to guard.
It’s mostly futile, though. Even the preseason games don’t tell us much. In 2023, the Giants lost their first preseason game by five points to a Detroit team that just barely fell short of reaching the Super Bowl. They barely beat a Carolina team that went 2-15. They lost a chippy game to the new, supposedly contending, Aaron Rodgers-led Jets whose highlight was Tyrod Taylor trying to hit Jalin Hyatt on a couple of deep routes against Sauce Gardner. Did anyone see the 40-0 skunking by Dallas on opening night and the subsequent disastrous season that followed? I didn’t.
This raises the question: How long will it be before we know whether this Giants team is any good, or whether 2025 will just be more of the same disappointment? As fans, we are prone to over-interpreting the result of the opening game. When it’s as bad as that 2023 Dallas opener it’s hard not to, and last year’s Minnesota opener was not far behind. Usually, though, it takes a little while to get the pulse of a team.
How long? Maybe a month or so is enough. Let’s look at several notable (good or bad) Giants teams from the past, as well as a couple of notable individual seasons of other teams. Instead of just win-loss record, which can be deceiving if games are close, let’s look at points scored and given up, and how those vary throughout a game, which may give us a feel for just how good a team’s play is, whether they are front runners or come-from-behind specialists, etc. As we’ll see, the first month or so has usually been good enough to rule in or out the team being awful. It’s often been good enough to identify the most dominant Giants teams, with one exception - the effect that an unforeseen serious injury can have on a team’s chances. It can differentiate front runners from comeback kids. It cannot predict miracles, of which there have been several in Giants’ history.
Here are the composite cumulative point differentials by quarter over the first month of the season for each team:
The four columns represent the point differential summed over the first four games at the end of the first, second, third, and fourth quarters. I’ve chosen specific Giants seasons of interest: The four Super Bowl-winning seasons (1986, 1990, 2007, 2011), the one Super Bowl loss season (2000),...
