Are the new-look Giants going to win the Super Bowl in 2016? Well, they certainly have a shot, according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, which says Big Blue has a 1 percent chance of winning the championship this year.
That’s right, 1 percent. A team that last season featured one of the league’s most explosive offenses is now even better with the additions at wide receiver of second-round draft pick Sterling Shepard and the previously injured Victor Cruz.
A defense that last year exhibited expert-level understanding of the rules of two-hand touch added three playmakers via free agency: defensive end Olivier Vernon (Dolphins), defensive tackle Snacks Harrison (previously of the wrong side of MetLife Stadium) and Janoris Jenkins (previously of a team that once played in St. Louis).
The 2015 Giants almost beat the Panthers and they gave the Patriots all they could handle. This is a team that is decidedly better than last year (and not because Tom Coughlin is gone) — and they only have a 1 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl? Does FiveThirtyEight take bets? If so, I’d like to put down a Benjamin that says the Giants are going to win it all.
One percent. Ya know who else has the same odds of winning the Super Bowl, according to Nate Silver’s site? These teams: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Baltimore.
With all due respect to Silver and the site that called all 50 states correctly in the 2012 presidential election, your numbers are whack. I’ve simulated the entire 2016 season at least 1.5 times in my mind, and there’s no way I can get halfway through it without falling off my chair and laughing at the thought that the Eagles have any chance — any year — of winning the Super Bowl.
It’s never gonna happen. And certainly not in a year when they’re starting a rookie quarterback.
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My season prediction for the Giants: win the NFC East, win a first-round game, win a second-round game, win the NFC Championship over Seattle, lose to the Steelers in the Super Bowl.
But let’s not get completely ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about Week One and eventually the Cowboys.
Week 1
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the NFL schedule is stupidly created. Instead of working to foster regional rivalries, the league tries to create some kind of inane sense of parity by having a rotating schedule that completely eliminates subjectivity. The league has no say in who plays who from year to year. They do, however, have a say in WHEN teams play each other. Given that, why on earth is there not a Rivalry Week in the NFL? A week when each team squares off against a division opponent? Say, this week — Week 1 — when the Giants face the Cowboys (awesome) while the Eagles face Cleveland (poo) and Washington faces the Steelers (awesome for Pittsburgh).
In addition to the Cowboys vs. the Giants, there are only three games this week featuring intra-divisional matchups: Tampa Bay at Atlanta; San Diego at Kansas City; and Los Angeles at San Francisco. How hard would it be to simply swap things around so that the remaining teams were also facing divisional opponents? What am I missing? We’re not talking about changing any team’s 2016 opponents. We’re simply changing the order so that every team faces a hated rival in Week 1.
Instead of Buffalo facing Baltimore and Cincinnati facing the Jets, the Bills would face the Jets and the Ravens would have the Bengals. Etc, etc.
Sure, this would create weeks later in the season when there’d be a dearth of divisional matchups. But who cares? The saying is that divisional games count twice in the standings. Just think how much they’d count — to teams, fans and the league — if every team had a divisional game in Week 1.
OK, now onto the Dallas game.
Dallas is one of the most intriguing teams in the league this year. Usually a squad featuring a rookie quarterback (Dak Prescott) and a rookie running back (Ezekiel Elliott) would be doomed from the get-go. As a long-time observer of Dallas and its fans, I would have welcomed such a scenario. But the Cowboys are a unique bunch. They have arguably the best offensive line in football, an All-Pro level wide receiver in Dez Bryant and a future Hall of Famer in tight end Jason Witten. If Elliott exhibits the same kind of punishing runs he dropped on the likes of Kam Chancellor of the Seahawks during the preseason, and Prescott can limit his inevitable rookie errors, this team will be able to hang against the Giants’ defense.
I say “hang,” because the Cowboys are not winning this game.
During the preseason, the Giants’ first-team offense was held scoreless, which caused a lot of fans to overreact. Meanwhile, the first-team defense — the team’s chief weakness in 2015 — was stout in the preseason. Look for the G-men to focus on curbing Dallas’ run games by stacking the box with eight defenders, mixing up blitzes (including from safety Landon Collins) in an effort to fluster Prescott.
On offense, the Giants will need to rely on game-breaking plays from the likes of Beckham, Cruz and Shepard, because general manager Jerry Reese thought it’d be a great idea to go into another season with Rashad Jennings as the starting running back. Dallas cut bait with its best defender — serial putz Greg Hardy — but playmaking linebacker Sean Lee is healthy (for now) and free safety Byron Jones has reportedly made huge strides in his second season.
Still, you can’t talk me into the Cowboys beating the Giants this week in Ben McAdoo's first game as head coach. Nevertheless, I give them a better chance of winning this game than FiveThirtyEight.com gives the Giants of winning the Super Bowl. In fact, I’d say the Cowboys have a 50 percent chance of winning this game: Either they will or they won’t.
