The New York Giants are 6-2 entering their bye week and all but one game (Week 8, Seattle Seahawks) has been decided by a single score. And even during that loss, the Giants had tied the game in the fourth quarter.
Despite Big Blue’s six wins, their point differential is just +6 on the season. That’s a potentially precarious position to be in for a team that’s rebuilding, but one safety Julian Love believes is sustainable.
“I think it could be like that for sure. As long as we just continue to do the important things, which is take care of the football, take the football away, stop the run, get our running offense going, play complementary football,” Love told reporters on Monday. “If we do all that — regardless of the score — we’re going to win games. That’s what it’s kind of been for us.
“Yeah, we want to be winning by more and all that stuff, but at the end of the day, if we win by one or we win by 30, a ‘W’ is a ‘W.’ That’s kind of been our mindset. Is it sustainable? Yeah, because it’s really based off of all the fundamentals of being successful at football. That’s kind of what (Brian Daboll) harps on each day.”
No one thought they would get to six wins using that formula, but here they are. Can they get to eight wins? Nine wins? 10 wins?
Love isn’t thinking about that and neither are his Giants teammates. They are focused on going 1-0 against the Houston Texans coming out of the bye week.
“You can’t think about the whole picture, this whole second half. We just know that we have a bye week,” Love said. “Obviously, we need to rest. We need to take it seriously this bye week because our bodies need to recover. It’s been a grueling past two months. When we come back, we’ll play the Texans, and it starts then with them. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves because we haven’t to this point, so we want to stay on that path.”
As far as the tight margins, the defense welcomes those challenges. And it all goes back to something Wink Martindale told the team this past spring.
“The margin for error is tight, for sure,” Love said. “But I always go back to what Wink told us right before the season started — in moments, like sudden change moments (where) a turnover happens or something like that, and normally guys are like, ‘Oh, man. We’ve got to go back on the field.’ He said something and he was like, ‘You should be excited to go back on the field to showcase who you are. I want you to be excited to run back on the field no matter the circumstances.
“That’s what I’ve taken into account and has been my mindset each time we go out there, especially in those pressure situations. I’m like, ‘Alright. Now it’s time to let my personality show through my play.’ I think this team has owned that, too, so that’s why you see us making these big plays in key situations.”
The defense has answered the call more often than not and if they can sustain that intensity, they can sustain the winning. But it wouldn’t hurt if the offense put a few more points on the board from time to time.
