Giants 'have a lot of work' to do after 40-0 opener

A day later, as you would expect, Cowboys 40, Giants 0 didn’t feel any better for the home team.

Getting manhandled in the season opener didn’t sit well with the Giants.

They couldn’t get out of their own way Sunday night, and that’s not meant to be disrespectful to the Cowboys, who were by far the better team.

On Monday, there still were plenty of situations to ponder.

As coach Brian Daboll watched tape — he said he slept little on Sunday night — he said he saw mainly what he expected.

“We got beat, no excuses,” he said. “I’d say there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of corrections that need to be made, and that’s what we’ll do.”

Winning can galvanize a team, especially when there are teamwide contributions. In this case, losing also was “a collective effort,” Daboll said. “I think seven times the ball was either in [Cowboys defenders’ hands] or on the ground. You start with ball security. We didn’t do a good enough job with that.”

Or anything else, for that matter.

Along with the Panthers and Vikings, the Giants are last in the league with a minus-3 turnover differential after one game.

During the preseason, Saquon Barkley didn’t play a down in a game. The Giants’ starting offense basically played one series, against Carolina. And yes, there were those joint practices with the Lions.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough competitive work in the preseason for the Giants, or perhaps the Cowboys are just that much better. We’ll get more answers in Week 2 at Arizona.

On Monday, wide receiver Darius Slayton and cornerback Adoree’ Jackson, along with Daboll, were available on Zoom calls.

Now in his fifth season, Slayton said the poor results hit a little deeper now.

“I’d say probably the biggest difference now is that we’re older,” Slayton said. “When you’re young, you kind of just think that ‘oh, we’ll work hard and we’ll get a different result,’ but, at the end of the day, as you grow in this league, you experience things and you understand.”

Slayton referred to the Giants’ 2022 season, when they went 9-7-1 and won a playoff game on the road.

“We got on the other side of that fence,” he said, “so now we know what it takes to win these games and we know what we need to do to fix it. Whereas in my first three years we were 4-12, 6-10, 4-[13]. We knew nothing about winning. So I would say that’s the biggest difference now. We know what it takes to win and we know what to do to get there.”

This embarrassing result wasn’t all about the play of the Cowboys, either.

“[And the conclusion you] come to is that we all had one too many ‘my bads,’ ” Slayton said. “Ultimately when you’re trying to win a football game, you can’t have everybody having multiple ‘my bads’ or ‘I would’ve done this different, I would’ve done that different,’ so I’d probably say that was just the main thing. We had too much of that.”

The Giants entered the season with the goal of closing the gap with the Cowboys and Eagles in the division.

So how did they let Sunday night happen?

“To be honest, the way the game went, the opponent really wouldn’t have mattered much,” Slayton said. “A lot of the stuff that we did was self-inflicted, or it was mistakes that we made that were technique- based or assignment-based. So it wouldn’t have mattered if it was them or Teaneck High School. There are just things we did that you just can’t do and expect to win football games in this league.”

By Kimberly Jones

kimberly.jones@newsday.comkimjonessports

Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.