After a half decade of coaching and personnel malpractice, the Giants saw the light of day in their season-opening win over the Titans. Sunday’s 21–20 victory was the first time the franchise won a season-opener since 2016.
We’re not going to tell you that, all of a sudden, they’re going to be a factor in the NFC East. We’re not going to say this is the team we all whiffed on this offseason. We’re not even going to float the idea that they’ll finish the season with a winning record.
We are going to ask that you go back and watch the game-winning sequence again, in which Saquon Barkley revived a dead-on-arrival shovel pass and plowed his way into the end zone. We’re going to suggest you focus on how he walked right back to new coach Brian Daboll, and Daboll did his best to remain upright while bear-hugging his running back. We’re going to ask you to watch Barkley in the moments after, where it looks like he’s trying to tell us that this has been here all along. That his journey didn’t have to be so hard.
We’re going to tell you that this was the story of the day Sunday in Nashville. When was the last time we saw a mutual gratitude between player and coach on this team? Coaches who make due with the players they have. Players who feel like playing for their coaches.
George Walker IV/Tennessean.com/USA TODAY Network
This is what professional football will now look like in East Rutherford. Gone are Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge. Gone are Jason Garrett and Dave Gettleman. Gone is a sequence of coaches and executives who were better at telling us how it should look than actually showing us on Sundays. The Giants are now the team going for two to win the game, instead of the team running a QB sneak on third-and-long.
It’s important to be measured after one week of football, but how can Giants fans not watch some of the drives on Sunday and feel a weight dropping off their shoulders? How incredible was it to see the Giants stopping a poorly blocked tight end sweep play instead of watching Garrett call it, pinning poor Evan Engram yards in the backfield? How refreshing was it to see talent arranged in an orderly manner?
How can you not think especially of Barkley at this moment? He was a talented player irresponsibly drafted into a maelstrom of confusion, the capstone of a structure that had no foundation or blueprint. Barkley was run into the ground and ignored in the passing game. He was forced to dance behind perforated walls of nothingness, and somewhere along the way, started to take a large portion of the blame that should have never been on his shoulders. He became the poster child of a stagnant era.
We’re not going to tell you that Barkley will lead the league in rushing this year, or even come anywhere close. But there is an obvious difference between a coaching staff willing to dig in and work with the talent on the roster, and a coaching staff waiting for help to arrive, mashing its roster into a cookie cutter that can’t contain its various edges.
Sunday’s win over the Titans still required a missed field goal at the end of regulation. We’re not ignoring how far they have to go or how lucky they’ll need to be in order to remain out of the doghouse in a market that has little sentimentality (let’s count the number of trade-Barkley-while-his-stock-is-high calls into the talk radio station tomorrow). All we’re saying is that it felt different, especially to those who have watched so much of the same over the last six years.
While it may have taken far too long, Giants ownership finally realized that so many of their issues were self-inflicted. They wanted a future that felt like the past without realizing that so much success in the NFL is irreplicable. For every stab they took at finding another Tom Coughlin, another Bill Parcells, another Eli Manning, they were watching contemporary stars come in, sit for interviews and walk out the door.
Ask around the building now, and you’ll hear it’s an amalgam of what Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen brought from the Bills, what Mike Kafka brought from the Chiefs and what Don Martindale brought from the Ravens. It’s about how they can splatter a whole painting together and hang up something worth admiring.
It’s too early to say it will ultimately change the course of Giants football, but it’s the closest thing we’ve seen to a break in the clouds.
