Giants at the breaking point: Fracture or stay together
Ben McAdoo of the Giants looks on before a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium on October 1, 2017 in Tampa, Florida. Credit: Getty Images / Joe Robbins
There are two ways this thing can go.
After four losses to open the season, including two in a row on walk-off field goals, any fragment of a sliver of a thread of hope of this being a successful year hangs in the balance Sunday against the equally winless and equally unfortunate Chargers.
But when a team gets to this point, it’s not all about fixing Xs and Os, adjusting game plans and making personnel decisions. Sometimes, when teams are sinking fast, as the Giants are right now, the biggest struggle is just to keep everybody from jumping ship.
That’s the challenge for this team: Finding a way to stick together. The rest of the season can play out with dignity or dysfunction. It’s up to the players to decide which.
“It’s fight or flight time,” Ben McAdoo said on a Monday conference call. “We have talented men of integrity in the locker room. It’s not going to be easy. But we have to go out there and fight. I expect us to fight.”
McAdoo said his greatest concern is players “going numb.
“You have to fight through it and you have to work for that first one, for the first win,” he said. “We can never accept this.”
That’s easier to say than to do, although it can be done. In 2013, when the Giants were 0-6, the locker room easily could have splintered. Instead, the team was held together by the sheer willpower of strong leaders such as Antrel Rolle and Tom Coughlin. They refused to allow anyone to even eye the lifeboats and won seven of their last 10 games.
Now, four years later, that calling falls on a new generation of Giants leaders, with McAdoo, who has never been in such a predicament, in charge. They need to find the right message, and do it quickly.
When asked about the possibility of losing hope, Eli Manning said, “That won’t be an option and we can’t allow that to happen,” during his weekly radio appearance on WFAN. “Some guys may have a harder time than others, so that’s where you have to have the leaders be great leaders and make sure everybody is focused, everybody has a great work ethic, is putting in all the time and all the effort that they need to.”
Even the leaders can struggle with that.
“I think the mood is in a strange spot,” running back Shane Vereen said about the temperature of the team in his weekly radio appearance on WFAN on Monday. “We know the season has its ups and downs, but unfortunately ours hasn’t even had its ups yet.”
“It’s hard to go ahead and say ‘Hey guys, keep playing, we’re gonna get one!’ when you’ve dropped the first four,” defensive captain Jonathan Casillas said Sunday. “It’s putting us in a real tough spot to do anything. We have to be able to take a step back and look ourselves in the mirror and see what we’re doing wrong, see what we can do better.”
There is a lot.
The Giants are struggling in all aspects of the game, and for the second straight week all three elements of what McAdoo calls “complementary football” failed them. It led to historic heartbreak, too. The Giants are only the third NFL team to lose back-to-back games on the final play of the fourth quarter, a feat of frustration also endured by the 1984 Browns and the 2006 Eagles.
“We’re 0-4 and our film verifies it,” McAdoo said of the mistake-riddled performances. “It starts with blocking, tackling, catching the football, kicking and punting, and especially in the fourth quarter.”
It is wearing on them.
“Nobody likes to lose,” Casillas said, “and for us to be a month into the season, four weeks, with no wins, it’s very, very, very frustrating. It’s getting old, that’s for sure.”
Manning was on that 2013 team, and offered some public advice to teammates after the game Sunday.
“You just keep fighting,” Manning said. “You keep fighting for a win and that’s all you do every week. Each week the record doesn’t matter, you just want that feeling. You want that feeling after the game that you did something, that you earned the win, that your preparation was good and that you came together as a team.
“We need it, we want it, but nothing is going to be given to us.”
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.
