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Giants' fourth straight loss brings them to familiar time: 'Tankathon' season

4 November 2024Last Update :
Giants' fourth straight loss brings them to familiar time: 'Tankathon' season

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — New York Giants linebacker Brian Burns, still in uniform, sat with his back against the wall next to defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence’s locker long after Sunday’s 27-22 loss to the Commanders. Lawrence, also still in uniform, sat on the chair facing his locker stall.

The Giants’ best defensive players declined to share the specifics of their extended conversation, but the blank stare on Burns’ face told the story. The Giants are a directionless team with no answers.

Sunday’s loss was their fourth straight. They’re 0-5 at home and 0-4 against NFC East opponents. At 2-7, they’re tied with six other teams for the worst record in the NFL.

“If I’m talking to my teammates, it’s nothing for you to be concerned about,” Lawrence said of his postgame briefing with Burns. “We’re just talking about the game and what we’re going to do to be better.”

As the Giants search for answers, Sunday’s loss was the unofficial kickoff of “Tankathon” season. Tankathon is the essential website for the fans of losing teams to track the draft order in real-time. It’s become an annual tradition for Giants fans to start refreshing the website around Halloween. The Giants are currently slated to pick seventh, with next Sunday’s matchup in Germany against the 2-7 Panthers carrying significant draft implications.

That’s how bleak things have become. Whereas last Monday’s 26-18 loss to the Steelers produced raw emotion and frustration, the vibe after Sunday’s defeat was numb.

Even as players went through the motions of answering questions with optimism about how things could turn around, there wasn’t much conviction.

The Giants are now 4-11-1 against NFC East opponents since coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen took over in 2022. That duo’s success in 2022 looks more like a mirage with each passing week. The Giants are 10-23-1 since the 7-2 start to that season that propelled the team to an unexpected playoff berth.

Ownership has promised the patience to allow Schoen and Daboll to build the Giants into a winner. That mostly feels like blind faith as this regime heads backward in its third season.

Here are more takeaways from the loss:

Defensive letdown

The Giants’ defense has carried the team for most of the season. That wasn’t the case Sunday.

The Giants failed to make a play all game against dynamic rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels. The Giants didn’t register a sack or a takeaway. At least the Giants forced the Commanders to punt twice; Washington didn’t punt at all in its 21-18 win in the rivals’ first meeting in Week 2.

“I think the offense played well enough for us to win,” Lawrence said. “Defense just got beat up today.”

That assessment is a bit favorable to the offense, which had only scored seven points in the first half. But the offense did come to life after the Giants trailed 21-7 at intermission. The defense repeatedly failed to come through with a much-needed stop in the second half.

Burns and Lawrence attributed the lack of sacks to the Commanders reliance on chip blocks to slow New York’s pass rushers. Even when the Giants did pressure Daniels, the slippery quarterback escaped the pocket and gained valuable yardage with his legs.

The Giants got a break when Washington’s top running back Brian Robinson, who shredded New York for 133 yards in Week 2, was a late scratch due to a hamstring injury. Still, the Commanders tallied 147 yards on 35 carries (excluding three Daniels kneel-downs). The tackling in the secondary was particularly dreadful after receptions.

Most troubling was the failure to execute and the lack of situational awareness late in the first half. The Commanders were facing third-and-18 at the Giants’ 42-yard line with 20 seconds remaining in the second quarter. With only one timeout remaining, Daniels threw a quick pass into the right flat to wide receiver Dyami Brown with the intention of getting close enough for a long field goal attempt before halftime.

Cornerback Dru Phillips was stiff-armed to the turf on his tackle attempt, and safety Tyler Nubin whiffed on a tackle attempt at the first-down marker. Brown reached the Giants’ 18-yard line for a first down with 11 seconds remaining as Washington called its final timeout.

The only thing Washington could do in that scenario was throw to the end zone. Yet, cornerback Deonte Banks somehow got caught flat-footed as Commanders wide receiver Terry McLaurin faked like he was running a post before bolting past Banks. The corner was helpless to defend Daniels’ perfect pass that settled into McLaurin’s arms for a touchdown to give the Commanders a 21-7 lead heading into the break.

“I just got to be better there,” Banks said.

Odd outing

It was a strange game for the Giants’ offense, as evidenced by quarterback Daniel Jones’ halftime stat line: 4-for-6, 0 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions.

The Giants ran the ball well against the Commanders in Week 2, so they entered with a ground-based game plan. That was a prudent approach, as five runs to open their second possession gained 63 yards to advance to Washington’s 39-yard line.

Daboll tried to mix in a screen, which proved disastrous. Outside linebacker Dante Fowler blew past left tackle Chris Hubbard and hit Jones as he tried to flip the pass to running back Devin Singletary. That set off a bizarre sequence, with the playing being whistled dead as an incomplete pass and Singletary not trying to recover the loose ball. But a Commanders challenge revealed that Jones fumbled and Washington was awarded the possession because linebacker Bobby Wagner had recovered the ball.

“Obviously the turnover was critical,” Jones said.

The Giants used their rushing attack to drive down the field on their next possession. Jones capped the drive with a 2-yard touchdown pass to blocking tight end Chris Manhertz on a play-action pass. Remarkably, that was Jones’ first touchdown pass at home since Week 17 of the 2022 season.

With Daboll operating like a service academy play caller, wide receiver Malik Nabers only had one target in the first half. He didn’t make his first catch until early in the third quarter.

Jones peppered Nabers with 10 targets as the Giants played catch-up in the second half, but the rookie only managed 59 yards on nine catches. Nabers had 30 catches for 320 yards and three touchdowns in the three games before suffering a concussion in Week 4. He has 20 catches for 171 yards and no touchdowns in three games since returning from a two-game absence.

“I don’t call the plays, so I mean, I don’t know,” Nabers said when asked if the early rushing success gave the offense a lift. “When you run the clock out in the first half, you’re scratching in the second half to try to score points, as many as possible. As an offense, you’ve got to be versatile. You’ve got to be able to run. You’ve got to be able to pass. You can’t pick between half and half what you want to do. But like I said, I’m not the play caller.”

It’s damning that the Giants’ 22 points represented their second-highest output of the season. They are scoring 15.4 points per game, the worst in the NFL.

Bad calls?

Daboll’s clock management late in the game was questionable. The Giants had all three timeouts after scoring a touchdown (but failing on the two-point conversion) to pull within 27-22 with 2:48 remaining.

The Commanders started at their 30-yard line after a touchdown and gained one yard on a first-down run. Rather than calling a timeout immediately with 2:42 on the clock, Daboll let it run. The Commanders’ next snap came with 2:05 remaining. That gave them flexibility to run or pass because the clock would stop after the play for the two-minute warning regardless. Emboldened by that fact, Daniels faked a handoff and lofted a pass to a wide-open Olamide Zaccheaus for a 42-yard gain. Zaccheaus was tackled at New York’s 27-yard line with 1:56 left.

“They had to snap the ball,” Daboll said. “We’d save them after that. If it was underneath a certain amount, we would have used it. If it was over a certain amount when the ball hit, we weren’t going to use it, let it go.”

The Commanders picked up two more first downs to kill the clock as the Giants burned their timeouts. It’s fair to wonder if the Giants had called a timeout with 2:42 remaining, would the Commanders have been as aggressive on second-and-9 as they were when there was no penalty for a possible incompletion?

Daboll again adhered to the analytics decision to go for two after scoring a touchdown when trailing by 14 points in the fourth quarter. So after Jones plowed through cornerback Mike Sainristil for a 2-yard touchdown to cut the deficit to 24-16 with 9:25 remaining, the Giants’ offense stayed on the field.

The conversion failed as Jones was tackled short of the goal line as he tried to scramble. That forced the Giants to go for two again when they scored on a 35-yard touchdown catch by tight end Theo Johnson to pull within 27-22 with 2:48 left. That attempt also failed, although it didn’t wind up mattering because the Giants never got the ball back.

The two-point decision is based on analytics. Here’s the extremely simplified breakdown of the math: If a team believes its odds of converting a two-point conversion is roughly 50 percent, it should go for two when scoring a touchdown while trailing by 14. If the team gets the first two-point conversion, it would trail by six points and would be in position to win in regulation with a point-after try after another touchdown. If the first two-point conversion fails, the odds would favor the second attempt being successful.

“That’s something we talk about during the week,” Daboll said. “If we get in that situation, that’s what we’re going to do. But it’s analytics-based.”

The more conventional approach would have involved relying on undrafted kicker Jude McAtamney, who was elevated from the practice squad after kicker Greg Joseph suffered an oblique injury on Friday. McAtamney would have needed to make two point-after kicks plus a potential game-winning field goal in overtime. Having an unproven kicker surely made it easier for Daboll go with the analytics-based decision.

The bigger problem was the execution and play calls were lacking, and the Giants came up empty. Daboll may need to weigh those factors more heavily in the future since the Giants are 0-for-6 on two-point tries this season and 1-for-10 over the past two seasons.

“I felt good about what we had, and they did a good job of stopping it,” Daboll said.

Trade talk

The focus now shifts to Tuesday’s 4 p.m. trade deadline. Wide receiver Darius Slayton and outside linebacker Azeez Ojulari are the Giants’ top trade chips.

Slayton made three catches for 49 yards before leaving late with a concussion. The concussion could complicate any trade negotiations, although it’s hard to imagine the Giants parting with one of the few reliable pieces from this dysfunctional offense even if that could be the best move for the future.

Ojulari came out of the game healthy and seems much more likely to be playing for a different team next weekend. The Lions, Falcons and Cardinals are all contenders in need of a pass rusher, so Ojulari, who has five sacks in the past four games, would be a logical target. The Giants will likely only be able to get a Day 3 pick for the 24-year-old, who is set to become a free agent.

(Photo of Daniel Jones: Al Bello / Getty Images)

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