New year looks like old year for Giants in dismal effort against Bears
Giants head coach Joe Judge looks on during the fourth quarter of the game against the Bears at Soldier Field on Sunday in Chicago. Credit: Getty Images/Quinn Harris
The Giants spent 60 minutes on the field in Chicago illustrating why wholesale organizational changes need to be made once this disappointing season ends next Sunday.
Joe Judge then spent 11 non-stop minutes arguing why they shouldn’t.
After the 29-3 loss to the Bears, Judge delivered an impassioned soliloquy that likely mirrors the points he’ll need to make to John Mara and Steve Tisch to save his job and become the first Giants head coach since Tom Coughlin to last into a third season. The gist of his long and winding speech: The foundations for success are being put in place behind the scenes, even if they’re not visible to the outside world.
"This ain’t some clown show organization," he said. "The toughest thing to change in a team, the toughest thing to change in a club, is the way people think. You understand that? That’s the toughest thing. You can get new players, you can get rid of your damn locker room all you want, you’ve got to change how people think. You’ve got to change how they [expletive] believe in what you’re doing."
On his way to that theme, Judge covered a number of topics that included a damning rebuke of the shambles in which Pat Shurmur, his immediate predecessor, left the locker room ("Everybody quit, everybody tapped out," he said he was told by players who were part of that regime), a claim that players from last year’s team call him regularly to say they wish they were back with the Giants even though they got bigger contracts elsewhere, the disclosure that players about to be free agents come to his office and "beg" to be re-signed by the Giants, and an insistence that the Giants have not checked out on this season, judging by a lack of golf clubs in the locker room.
At one point he even acknowledged the growing sentiment from an impatient fan base that has heard enough claims of behind-the-scenes victories and is hungering for his removal and tangible results.
"If we don’t play well, every fan has the right to boo my [butt] out of the stadium," he said.
That may very well happen on Sunday when the Giants wrap up this dreadful season against Washington at MetLife Stadium. Whether or not it is the final time we see Judge on the sideline for the team is a bit less certain.
General manager Dave Gettleman has long been expected to be replaced, but the team’s performances in the past three games may nudge an ownership that once stood firmly behind Judge to make a coaching move as well.
When he hired Judge, Mara said it was important to show the first-time head coach more patience than the Giants afforded his two predecessors, both of whom were fired after two seasons. Now Mara and Tisch must determine whether that patience has reached its limits.
Sunday’s game certainly didn’t help Judge’s case for staying as the Giants dropped their fifth straight to fall to 4-12. It was their seventh straight road defeat.
That the loss came not to a playoff-bound team like the ones against Dallas and Philadelphia but a nothing-to-play-for team like themselves only amplified the awfulness of the product the Giants have become.
That part is indefensible, even by Judge. "It wasn’t good enough," he said.
It was a game in which the Giants all but abandoned the pass, throwing on only 16 of their 52 offensive snaps. With sacks factoring in, they had a mind-boggling minus-10 passing yards.
The side result was one of the more productive games for Saquon Barkley since he left the same stadium with a torn ACL in Week 2 of the 2020 season. He ran for 102 yards on 21 carries, including four on direct snaps as the Giants eschewed the quarterback position altogether — but that was barely enough to overcome the rest of the team’s glaring shortcomings, including four turnovers by quarterback Mike Glennon (two interceptions, two fumbles).
Glennon completed four of the 11 passes he was able to throw for 24 yards with a rating of 5.3, a performance he at least had the self-awareness to describe as "embarrassing."
Things fell apart quickly for them. On the first play of the game, Glennon was sacked by an unblocked Trevis Gipson and fumbled. The Bears recovered it, and on their first play, David Montgomery scored on a 2-yard run to make it 7-0 just 18 seconds in.
The Giants’ next possession ended with an interception and led to a second short-field touchdown drive by the Bears, who went up 14-0 with 6:54 expired.
The Giants got on the board in the second quarter when a 38-yard field goal capped a drive featuring nine straight runs, but the end of the first half was just as disastrous as the start of it.
It began with a dropped interception by Logan Ryan in the end zone that allowed the Bears to kick a field goal with 1:01 left.
On the ensuing kickoff, Pharoh Cooper seemed to believe the ball would bounce into the end zone, but it stopped at the 3 as a live ball. Cooper was able to recover it, but he was tackled at the 5.
The Giants went backward from there and gave up a safety when Devontae Booker was tackled for a loss on second-and-14 from the 1. That made it 19-3 with 52 seconds left, but the Bears weren’t done. They still had time to drive for a 44-yard field goal as time expired to go up 22-3 at the half.
By the time the Giants touched the ball next, the Bears were up 29-3 on another 2-yard touchdown run by Montgomery, this one at the end of an 11-play, 75-yard drive. Two Giants takeaways — interceptions by James Bradberry and Tae Crowder — kept them from further humiliation.
Those plays, Judge said, back his belief that the Giants are going "in the right direction" when it comes to their willingness to keep fighting.
"The game was over," he said. "We’re out. It’s done. Vegas is already paying out . . . But that’s two weeks in a row I’m sitting there watching our defense finish the way they’ve got to finish."
Such fortitude has not been close to enough to save this season. Whether it winds up being enough to save Judge is the bigger issue for the Giants right now.
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.
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