Giants somehow would be back in thick of NFC East race with victory over Eagles
Blake Martinez #54 of the Giants reacts after making an interception in the second quarter against the Washington Football Team at FedExField on November 08, 2020 in Landover, Maryland. Credit: Getty Images/Greg Fiume
It’s Week 10 in the NFL. The season is more than halfway over and there is only one team in the league the Giants have beaten. Every time they have played a team with an actual name, they have lost.
Sounds pretty miserable.
And yet, if they can beat the Eagles on Sunday at MetLife Stadium, the Giants will have just as many wins as anyone else in the NFC East with a total of – drumroll, please – three!
"It’s definitely strange," linebacker Blake Martinez said. "But the NFL is crazy."
Of course to maintain their thin hopes of winning the division, the Giants have to win games against teams in the division. They’ve already topped Washington twice, accounting for the first number in their 2-7 record. You have to go back years, though, to find the last time they beat anyone else in the NFC East.
They head into Sunday’s game having lost seven straight to the Eagles, including a one-point heartbreaker of a collapse in Philadelphia just three weeks ago. That game sits among the large heap of ones the Giants should have won but did not, a pile of frustration that has so far defined most of this season.
A win on Sunday would go a long way toward moving away from that mountain.
The Giants are still technically in last place. Washington (2-6) and Dallas (2-7) have the same number of victories as they do. The Eagles are a stride ahead of everyone else at 3-4-1. Washington plays the Lions this weekend while the Cowboys have their bye.
"It’s a big thing," guard Kevin Zeitler said of the game against the Eagles. "We know where we are at, and we know where the division is at. Obviously, every win in the division is a big thing."
There were some players already voicing those same thoughts on Sunday – "Our division is so open and everything is right there in front of us still," defensive lineman Leonard Williams said then -- but that’s the last thing Joe Judge wants his team thinking about. Even in the glow of Sunday’s win over Washington that inexplicably resuscitated their hopes of coming out on top of this four-team corner of despair in the NFL, Judge was downplaying the big picture.
"Look, we're just trying to go 1-0 every week," he said. "I'm not posting in front of my team what the record is for the season to be completely honest here right now. That's the last thing we should care about. We have to worry about day by day and week by week making constant improvement as a team and moving in the right direction."
On Monday, Judge said they were off to a good start with that.
"There’s a little more joking around and laughing at different times," he said of the rare day after a victory, "but ultimately they came in the room and they were very easy to coach, very receptive. We had success [Sunday]. Let’s not mistake that for thinking everything is perfect . . . I didn’t see a group of guys come in like we have everything figured out. I saw a group of guys come in here ready to learn, ready to work, and ready to move forward."
And maybe even ready to compete for the crown.
"You just go with it week by week, make the improvements necessary, and see how the dice fall," Martinez said. "It’s one of those situations where you see where we have been through this whole season and to know that we still have a shot and we still have an opportunity right in front of us to do what we need to do, it’s an awesome feeling. As a competitor, you love it."
Three wins through 10 games heading into their bye would not be impressive for most teams. For the Giants in the NFC East, though, it may be enough to at least make the second half of the season interesting.
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.
