Eli Manning still believes 0-4 Giants can turn season around
The whole world has written off the 0-4 Giants. Eli Manning has not.
“I still think we’re a good team,” he insisted on his weekly radio segment on WFAN on Monday evening.
The problem is that he has no wins to prove it. So how does a quarterback, a team leader, block out the noise and frustrations of those beyond the team’s walls and get his fellow players to buy in? By telling them that no one else can do it but them.
“We’re the only people who can make a difference,” he said. “The only people who can make a change are going to be the guys in that meeting room on Wednesday morning. It’s going to be a decision that we have to make if we want to change things and get back to winning games.”
Manning said the biggest obstacle right now is believing that it can happen.
“We’ve gotta have confidence before the first win,” he said. “You can’t just get the first win and say ‘OK, now we have confidence.’ Something has to trigger in guys. Even though we haven’t had much success in certain situations, we have to have the mindset that we can make those plays, that we are a good team, and each guy is going to do what they have to do to make a play in the critical moments to win.”
Manning pointed out that there are no runaway teams in the NFL and that the Giants can go on a hot streak. True, only one team since 1990 has ever come back from 0-4 to make the playoffs. But the Giants did have a four-game losing streak that blossomed into losing five of six games in 2011, and they went on to win a Super Bowl that season.
Time for that kind of optimism is running out, though, and even Manning concedes that.
“Let’s give ourselves a chance,” he said. “No one know what’s going to happen, but if we don’t start winning soon, we will know what’s going to happen.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
More Giants
