Giants' gambles on aggressive play calls prove costly in loss to Browns
Cleveland Browns' Malcolm Smith (56) breaks up a pass to Giants' Nick Gates (65) from Riley Dixon (9) during the first half of an NFL football game Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. Credit: AP/Seth Wenig
When a head coach calls for a fake field goal that has his punter throw a pass to his center in the end zone on fourth-and-5 from the 8-yard line, he knows there are two ways it can go.
"You hit that thing and everyone is saying you’re the guru," Joe Judge said.
No one was saying that Sunday night against the Browns.
That’s because that play went the other way, the sour way, as did almost everything else the Giants tried to do to compensate for their shortcomings in personnel both on the field and on the sideline.
The result was a 20-6 loss at MetLife Stadium that dropped the Giants to 5-9 and left them teetering on the edge of elimination in the NFC East.
That gimmicky pass from Riley Dixon to Nick Gates was high and incomplete and capped the first of three first-half drives that reached the red zone but resulted in just three points for the Giants.
The other drive that came up empty stalled in a more traditional way, when Wayne Gallman was stopped short of the sticks on a fourth-and-a-long-1 run from the 5 midway through the second quarter.
The Giants felt they needed sixes and not threes, but twice in the first half, they came away with neither. They became the first team with two first-half turnovers on downs inside the 10 since 2006.
By the time the half ended, the Browns were ahead 13-3, with the points the Giants left on the field early hanging over them like Dickensian holiday haunters. When the Browns scored on a second 95-yard drive early in the fourth quarter to take a 20-3 lead, the game was all but over.
Afterward, Judge had little remorse about being so aggressive. "Field goals weren’t going to win this game," he said.
Not with Colt McCoy starting at quarterback for the injured Daniel Jones and with Freddie Kitchens handling the offensive play-calling because Jason Garrett tested positive for COVID-19. And certainly not with the Giants’ best cornerback, James Bradberry, sidelined by an encounter with a chiropractor who had tested positive for COVID-19.
Judge, in making his calculations, knew all of the Giants’ weaknesses and also the Browns’ strengths. He had seen them score 83 points in their past two games.
What he didn’t know was that his defense, despite allowing Baker Mayfield to pick their zone coverages apart with 27-for-32 passing for 297 yards and two touchdowns, would hold the Browns (10-4) to 20 points. Would that have changed his early gambles?
"You don’t go in with some kind of crystal ball and say they’re only going to score 20 points," Judge said. "That’s the way you have to play it sometimes. We have to make the decision to be aggressive. Obviously, this team scored a lot of points throughout the year, it’s an explosive offense, they do a very good job of moving it, they’ve been on a hot streak lately. We knew coming in what kind of team they were, and we had to call the game a certain way."
The Giants players said they appreciated Judge’s decision-making.
"I love the fact that Coach has the confidence in us to go for those situations we got into," wide receiver Sterling Shepard said.
Added safety Logan Ryan: "Joe is an aggressive head coach. You can do that when you have a really good defense, and we have to back our head coach when he does make aggressive calls."
That reaction was just another element in why Judge said he made the decisions he did.
"When you make calls like that, you make your players understand you have confidence in them and they can play the game aggressively," Judge said. "I can’t tell them all week that they should go into this game with an aggressive mindset and then hold them back at some point when we feel we have a chance to make a play."
A win Sunday would have pushed the Giants into a first-place tie with Washington in the NFC East. Instead, the loss kept them a game behind Washington and dropped them into a tie with Dallas with two games left. One of those games is a Week 17 meeting with Dallas. The Eagles also are alive in the division race, 1 1⁄2 games behind Washington.
The Giants will face the Ravens in Week 16. If they lose and Washington beats the Panthers, the Giants will be eliminated on Sunday.
Like that fake field goal call, there are two ways this division race can go for the Giants.
"We’re not totally out of this thing," Shepard said.
This loss, though, pushed them that much closer to that being the case.
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.
