On Sunday night, fans packed into MetLife Stadium for the New York Giants season opener against the Dallas Cowboys in what should have been an exciting and competitive football game. And for the first three minutes it seemed like this was the direction it was heading, until a series of unfortunate events took place on that very first drive.
Giants offensive lineman, Andrew Thomas, was called for a rare false start; John Michael Schmitz bounced a snap to Daniel Jones and then on Graham Gano’s 45-yard field goal attempt Juanyeh Thomas blocked the kick and Noah Igbinoghene recovered it and ran it back for 58-yard touchdown.
The game just proceeded to get worse from there. What’s that saying about rock bottom? Once you hit it, you can only go up from there? Well, that didn’t apply to the Giants on Sunday Night. While the torrential downpours didn’t help, I don’t think perfect weather would have made a difference because Daniel Jones didn’t stand a chance with that abhorrent offensive line play which allowed seven sacks.
Let’s get into my Top 4 Takeaways from the game...
- Protect This House – And your quarterback, and the football, and you get the idea. One of the main reasons for the Giants’ success last season was their ability to protect the football. The Giants had the second fewest turnovers last season while Daniel Jones already clocked 2 interceptions on the night. If you can’t protect your quarterback this is exactly the type of game, you can expect.
- Offensive Line Play – And I mean offensive! Jones was pressured or sacked on 17 of 22 drop backs and did not have a clean pocket all night. While the offensive line has been a concern all off-season, what’s more concerning is that the New York Giants have been trying to build and offensive line since 2016 which pretty much destroyed the end of Eli Manning's career and set Daniel Jones up for failure at the start of his career. It’s been almost a decade and the Giants still can’t get the offensive line right.
- Speaking of a Decade – The Giants had Tom Quinn as Special Teams coach from 2007-2017 and I remember thinking Special Teams were bad back then (they were) and yet somehow with Tom McGaughey at the helm since 2018 we still haven’t seen any improvement. In fact, this is another unit that the Giants organization just can’t seem to make any headway with. Watching special teams in training camp this summer was quite concerning and underwhelming.
- Practice? - Was there a game plan on Sunday night? Logically we know there was, however, if you went solely based on the execution on the field you would think they spent the entire summer at the beach. Watching this game felt like the first day of school. Dazed, confused, forgetting everything you learned just a few months prior, unprepared, and mentally not ready to take on the new school year. Yeh, that about sums it up. From the coaching to the players executing the game plan it looked like no one practiced ever in their life.
The product that the New York Giants put on the field on Sunday night was downright embarrassing and unacceptable. The only positive that I hope we can all take away from this debacle of a game is that hopefully this was a major wake up call for the team and they start righting the ship Week 2 in Arizona.
Let us know your thoughts on the game and stay tuned for more great content from the Jersey Sporting News team!
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