The New York Giants (0-0) and Dallas Cowboys (0-0) will square off on Sunday night in a Week 1 matchup at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
The Giants opened the week as 3.5-point home underdogs but that has improved to +3 as of this writing.
Buy Giants TicketsWith this matchup on tap, Giants Wire took the opportunity to hold a Q&A with Cowboys Wire managing editor KD Drummond.
Daniel Jones is healthy and no longer turns the ball over. Dak Prescott has become injury-prone and turnover-prone. How do fans in Cowboys land square that in their own minds after years of hammering home that exact criticism of DJ?
Drummond: For starters, they avoid smoking the crack that leads to jumping to conclusions off of one season compared to an entire body of work. For starters. Look, Cowboys fans get how starved for attention the Giants’ fanbase has been, so congratulations on your nine-win regular season. Daniel Jones did a great job of avoiding turnovers because he simply stopped being aggressive. A mind-number 66% of his passes were 9 yards or less. He went deep less than 1 out of every 20 passes. Brian Daboll put the training wheels on him. It was a great first step towards being respectable, but hold off on the anointing oil. As for Prescott, he had a career 1.7% INT ratio through seven seasons before last year’s fluky campaign. Giants fans are like the Kingsford commercial where the guy’s been inside all winter and finally is back outside. Get you guys a burger, stat.
Giants Wire non-crack notes: Prescott has 29 interceptions and 21 fumbles over the past three seasons (33 games played, an average of 11 per season).
Mike McCarthy has taken over the play-calling in Dallas. How different will the offense look under his direction and what are some of the changes we can expect to see?
It will be interesting. I’m not a fan of McCarthy keeping all the starters out the entire preseason, it’s led to worsening Week 1 performances year after year. Whenever the offense gets going though there are going to be a ton of more horizontal concepts incorporated which will widen the lens for Prescott to hit a slew of targets who are going to be YAC monsters in 2023. Dallas averaged an abysmal 4.7 yards after the catch in 2022, that should jump at least a half a yard this season. Also, there will obviously be a much deeper rotation of running backs with Tony Pollard, Rico Dowdle and Deuce Vaughn all being vastly different players.
Dalton Schultz (and Jason Witten before him) was a major thorn in the Giants' side. What do the Cowboys have in Jake Ferguson and Luke Schoonmaker, and do you think they'll yield similar results?
I think they’ll be security blankets. Neither is going to be a target magnet as Dallas simply has a slew of more athletic options in CeeDee Lamb and Brandin Cooks as lead dogs and then a formidable cluster of backups in Michael Gallup, and the much-improved duo of speedster Kavontae Turpin and second-year man Jalen Tolbert. They will be sticky-handed but I don’t expect any shattering statistical outputs from either this season. Ferguson will get the majority of those targets early in the season and that will likely shift to a more even split as the year goes on.
How confident are you in the Cowboys OL if Tyron Smith and Tyler Smith can't play on Sunday night or try to play through injury?
Not very much, to be honest. The Cowboys changed offensive line coaches and then sat their starters the entire preseason, and now the left tackle and left guard aren’t 100%. Tyler Smith was Tyron’s backup but he’s the worse off of the two. I think rookie Asim Richards would’ve been fine playing next to Tyron, but if it’s him and Chuma Edoga on the outside? I’m afraid.
For the first time this year, hit me with a final Giants-Cowboys score prediction.
The Cowboys are a legitimate Super Bowl contender, there’s so much talent on this team it’s scary. But in this game? With no live bullets being fired, a gimpy left side of the line and the atmosphere of a Giants fanbase who haven’t gone into a season with hope in several seasons? I think this season starts with an L for the Cowboys. Giants 21, Cowboys 17.
