Thursday night’s game against Washington is a must-win for the Giants. At 0-2, and bearing the ignominy of being the only team in NFL history to blow two 10-point leads in the fourth quarter of their first two games, the Giants’ glass nevertheless remains half full.
Fans are still on board, confident the Eli-Coughlin administration was simply emitting its season’s worth of brain farts in throwing away two very winnable games against the Cowboys and Falcons. But if they lose to Washington at home to drop to 0-3? Yeah, Giants fans will suddenly be much more available on Sunday afternoons this fall to check out the foliage, smash some pumpkins or sleep in a corn maze.
Blowing late game leads to the likes of Tony Romo and Julio Jones are one thing. Losing to a Washington team whose best available wideout is Art Monk (or maybe Pierre Garcon) is something else entirely.
Washington fans are feeling pretty good about themselves and their team after Washington ran at will against a usually stout Rams defense last week, with Matt Jones and Alfred Morris doing an admirable impression of the Earnest Byner-Kevin Mack era Cleveland Browns.
This must stop. Washington fans need to be reminded that the wife of their general manager basically accused an ESPN reporter of servicing her husband to obtain tips about the team. That’s the Washington team we all know and expect. A Washington team on the precipice of going 2-1 and perhaps tying the Cowboys for the NFC East lead? Nope, not a world I want to live in.
The game plan for the Giants should be pretty straight forward. On offense, they need to remind Washington cornerback Deangelo Hall that he is perhaps the most overpaid, overrated, over talking (we’re making that a term) defensive player of the 21st century. If Odell Beckham is targeted fewer than five times per quarter, Giants offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo should be fired. Extreme? Yes, but frankly no Giants fan is going to care who survives the housecleaning if the Giants lose to the most dysfunctional franchise in professional sports.
Will a victory against Washington turn the team’s season around? Debatable. But the Giants’ upcoming schedule –- at Buffalo, San Francisco, at Philadelphia, hosting Matt Cassel and Brandon Weeden -– is about as favorable as it gets. Get past Washington and its resurgent running game and vistas of beautiful lilacs will emerge for the Giants and their fans. Lose to Dan Snyder’s traveling freak show and you might as well call it a day because the season is effectively over.
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The team gets back a big part of its defense in middle linebacker Jon Beason, who has been injured since the Nixon era. The Giants absolutely need to make Kirk Cousins beat them. Washington hung tough before falling to Miami (which looks less impressive in retrospect given the Dolphins’ week two loss to Jacksonville) and more or less dominated a St. Louis team that had defeated Seattle in week one.
Against St. Louis, Cousins was 23 of 27 for 203 yards and a touchdown, and so he brought honor to his family –- unlike Eli Manning, who has been managing late-game situations like a fourth-grader charged with explaining trigonometry to a stadium full of frothing miscreants.
No more late-game snafus. No more incredulous looks from Tom Coughlin. No more comments like, “Well, at least Josh Brown had a nice game.” Giants fans have already had a season’s worth of stupidity. The indignity of losing to Washington at home will provide them with a season’s worth of everything.
