The Giants’ season will be over before the calendar turns to October if they lose on Sunday Night Football to the Kansas City Chiefs in Week 3.
Nothing matters other than a win in their MetLife Stadium home opener, however Brian Daboll’s team gets it.
It won’t be enough for Russell Wilson and the Giants’ offense to repeat their 37-point Week 2 Dallas performance if the Giants’ defense disappoints again.
A bounce back from Shane Bowen’s defense won’t matter if Mike Kafka’s offense reverts to the level of the Giants’ six-point Week 1 dud at Washington.
Results. That’s what GM Joe Schoen and Daboll need to validate five months’ worth of Instagram hype. Otherwise, the home crowd will grow impatient quickly.
And they’ll have every right to feel that way as paying supporters of a franchise that has lost 13 of its last 14 games overall, eight of its last nine at home and eight straight to NFC East foes.
“That’s what it’s for, winning the games,” Daboll said of the work his Giants (0-2) are putting in to prepare for the Chiefs (0-2). “Put everything into it. Go out there and produce. Obviously, the result is what’s most important. [We’re] doing everything we can to get that result.”
An 0-3 record is a death sentence for an NFL season.
Only six NFL teams have made the playoffs after an 0-3 start since the 1970 NFL merger, per Elias Sports Bureau. No team has persevered through an 0-3 start to make the postseason since the 2018 Houston Texans.
This isn’t about the playoffs for the Giants, though. They’re not in that conversation.
This is about irrelevance and apathy creeping into the team and fan base a month before Halloween.
This is about how quickly planes will begin flying over MetLife Stadium again if the results don’t change.
This is about what an 0-3 record would mean for co-owner John Mara’s patience with a GM and coach that he brought back despite a 3-14 record in the Giants’ centennial 2024 season.
“It better not take too long because I’ve just about run out of patience,” Mara said in January of the improvement he’s seeking in 2025. “I’m going to have to be in a better mood this time next year than I am right now.”
Mara’s mood undoubtedly improved during Sunday’s 37-point outburst in Dallas, considering the sorry offensive performance he had watched in the season opener against the Commanders.
If the Giants can be entertaining, win or lose, that is an improvement on the product the team’s owners have been selling to fans in recent years.
Still, it would be a losers’ mentality to count moral victories if the Giants’ leadership continues to find ways to beat themselves — and if they remain consistently unable to win games in Year 4 of their regime.
Consider the Giants’ lack of discipline: The Giants’ 14 penalties against the Cowboys were the most by the Giants in a game since 2005 (16), per Elias. And their 160 penalty yards were the most by a Giants team since 1949 and the most by any NFL team since Dallas in 2021.
They also rank 31st out of 32 NFL teams with a measly 14.29% red zone success rate scoring touchdowns, per teamrankings.com.
That’s one of the reasons Daboll put rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart into the Giants’ Week 2 game even though Wilson’s offense was having a big day throwing the ball: they weren’t scoring in the red zone.
“We had a lot of penalties,” top receiver Malik Nabers said. “[We’re] trying to play a cleaner game, trying to finish out with points in the red zone.”
Mara also can’t possibly ignore that Daniel Jones is thriving as the Colts’ starting quarterback after the Giants benched and released him in the middle of last season.
The Indianapolis offense hasn’t punted once yet through two games, led by a player that the Giants signed to a four-year, $160 million extension and then blamed for his subpar play.
Dexter Lawrence and the Giants’ players have done their best to try to carry over the good parts of their game in Dallas and to flush out the bad.
Teams have to try to stay optimistic, positive and resilient in the face of adversity.
But it was a bit disconcerting when Lawrence was asked if the Chiefs were vulnerable at 0-2, and he said that one reason not to judge a team by its record was that “wins don’t always go your way, clearly.”
The Giants did not win at Dallas, despite the fact that they should have.
They lost. Recently, they always lose.
No one cares that Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce and Andy Reid and Steve Spagnuolo are leading the team that they now have to beat.
That’s the task.
The Giants will be on prime time only once between Sunday night and Dec. 1. This is the time to resurrect a season on life support.
This is their chance to show the world that they deserve respect. Or else they will fade back into irrelevance, dragging Daboll’s and Wilson’s jobs down with them.