Giants plan to get some rest as they enter bye week 6-2
Giants quarterback Daniel Jones walks off the field after an NFL game against the Seahawks in Seattle on Sunday. Credit: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
Safety Julian Love said on Monday that “it can’t be overstated” how cool it is for the Giants to be 6-2 after eight games.
So much cooler than being 1-7 or 2-6 or whatever rotten eight-game record they toted around in years past.
Coach Brian Daboll said those eight games “are in the past.”
That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, and that the Giants aren’t excited about what comes next as they go into their bye week, even after Sunday’s 27-13 loss in Seattle.
Sure, the flight home from Seattle would have been more pleasant if the Giants hadn’t seen their four-game winning streak snapped by the Geno Smith-led Seahawks.
But considering where the Giants have been — and looking at their next two opponents in Houston and Detroit — it makes sense that Daboll called the first eight games “money in the bank, so to speak.”
With winnable home games for the next two, is Daboll going to be dreaming of 8-2 during his time off?
“We’re sitting at 6-2,” he said Monday. “We have nine games left that are on the schedule, and we got to take them one week at a time. Get a little bit of rest right now. We’ve got a long stretch here. Come back rejuvenated, ready to go and get ready to play Houston. Just take it one week at a time.”
Daboll had the players in for meetings Monday and then let them disperse for the rest of the week. The first-year head coach even said he’s planning to give himself and his assistants a bit of a break, too.
“At this point in time during the season, I think everyone’s tired, coaching-wise,” Daboll said. “Everybody’s sore, playing-wise. It’s just the nature of this league, and you just keep on pushing through. I think you need to try to take advantage of a little bit of downtime to recuperate, to get some rest and to come back fresh and ready to go for us this last half of the season.
“We have some workdays ahead of us here as a coaching staff to kind of look into some things and then get ready for Houston. You’re always self-evaluating yourself each week. We have quality control coaches. We have analytics. Then the coaches do it. We try to do it on a week-to-week basis and try to improve on things that maybe we’re not doing as good of a job as we’d like to do and try to build off some of the positive things.
“So we’ll always continue to do that. But really, we’re in right now looking at this tape. And the next few days, we’ll have some time to get on to Houston and look at a few other things.”
The Giants have outscored their opponents by a total of only six points this season (163-157). But 6-2 is 6-2.
“It’s a credit to how we go about each week,” Love said. “Whether we win, lose, the mission and the focus stays the same the Monday after we come in. That’s top down. That starts, obviously, with [general manager Joe Schoen] and Coach Daboll. They’ve done a great job of keeping it in perspective, week to week.”
Quarterback Daniel Jones, who was sacked five times on Sunday, will enjoy the time off to regroup.
“I’m going to try to reset a little bit,” he said. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do, if I hang around here for a little bit, maybe try to go home. But I think look back at this first half, kind of review that, see what I could have done better, what we could have done better, things we can learn and take from to best attack the second half of the season.”
Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.
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