Feel free to start your Giants panic — it was that bad
More than ever, Week 1 of an NFL season has become a wonderland of overreaction. Win the game? Visions of 14-3 and 15-2 can go dancing through your imagination. Lose? “OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod, will we ever win another game? Can we even win three or four? When is the draft, again?”
Happens every year. Usually, it’s daft. The Chiefs lost their first game of the year last year. They decided to keep playing the full schedule. The Jets won their first game last year. Football forensic teams are still trying to determine how. The first week is football’s silly season, players finally getting around to actually playing after the folly of preseason.
No need to jump either to conclusions or off a bridge.
Usually.
Except for the second straight season, the Giants have now ignited such an enormous stink bomb in their first game — like last year, in front of 81,908 disbelieving eyes — that I feel I’d be lying to you, dear reader, if I told you not to overreact, not to panic, not to suddenly wonder if you’re reading from the same old script.
It was that bad?
It was that bad. It was Vikings 28, Giants 6, and across the game’s final 40 minutes or so it sure felt an awful lot like Cowboys 40, Giants 0, a year ago. Those Cowboys, though, won 12 games. These Vikings — assuming we don’t get caught in the riptide of overreaction — will be hard-pressed to win half as many. Though the Giants sure made that a much easier task Sunday afternoon.
“Disappointing game,” Giants head coach Brian Daboll said. “Lots to clear up. We’ll make corrections and be better.”
That sounds like a wonderful plan, until you realize exactly what happened, and by that we should start with this, presented in italics and capital letters lest you think it’s a practical joke: THEY WERE FILLETED AND TAKEN TO SCHOOL BY SAM DARNOLD.
Yes, Sam Darnold. Darnold was magnificent, completing his first 10 passes, finishing 19-for-24 with two touchdowns and one pick that was deflected at the line of scrimmage. Apparently, someone forgot to let the ghosts into the building, which was a shame, because the defensive line (one sack all day) and the secondary (every bit as porous as advertised) could’ve used the help.
“They didn’t surprise us,” Brian Burns (four tackles, zero sacks in his Giants debut) said.
“We knew what they were going do and they did it,” said Kayvon Thibodeaux, who had four fewer tackles than Burns.
This was all said by manner of explanation, but if the quiet duo hoped to mitigate the calamity everyone watched, all it did was beg the question:
You knew what was coming and you still got boat-raced?
And we are now 479 words into this column and we haven’t mentioned the words “Daniel Jones” yet, which ought to give you a further idea of just how brutal the day was overall because Jones was —
(Searching for a cup of kindness here, because Jones WAS coming off a season-ending knee injury and so was expected to be rustier than a ’57 Chevy left out in the rain. Searching for a mollifying adjective. Searching, searching, searching …)
— awful. Jones was awful. Some of it was corrosion and some of it was not yet reacclimating to the shocking speed of the game.
But truthfully, a lot of the day looked like the Jones’ Greatest Hits we’ve seen across the last five years: inaccurate throws, sure, but a troubling mix of poor decisions and catastrophic ones. You start with the pick-six that Minnesota’s Andrew Van Ginkel took 10 yards home to pay dirt that ended the scoring with more than 19 minutes still to play and ended the competitive portion of the afternoon program.
