NFL Preview: Unfinished business for Giants

How do the Giants improve on last year's 10-6 record and get into the playoffs for the first time in three seasons?

For starters, they finish.

Tom Coughlin has been impressing that word on his players since they arrived at training camp in late July. "You're constantly saying 'finish, finish, finish,' '' Coughlin said.

The Giants have been more focused on finishes this past month than Minwax. And with good reason, too. Because they've been shellacked late in games and late in seasons.

The most glaring example of both in recent memory was, of course, the meltdown against the Eagles that still haunts many of the players and coaches. They led by 21 points with less than eight minutes remaining in a game that would likely decide the NFC East champion, but allowed four touchdowns, including one on a punt return on the final play by DeSean Jackson.

"As we all saw last season, we had some games where we were hanging in at the end of the game and things fell apart," linebacker Michael Boley said. "That is one thing that we want to get corrected as a whole."

The loss carried over to the following week, when the Giants lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion Packers, meaning that even a win in the finale was not enough to get them into the playoffs.

SEE PHOTOSHit or miss: Giants 1st-round picks since 1986

The Eagles debacle has become a symbol of Giants football in recent years, a streak that includes three steady failures: a failure to close out wins, a failure to win games late in the season, and a failure to beat the Eagles. The Giants will have to overcome all of those if they hope to make the playoffs this season.

General manager Jerry Reese is on record as saying that's the expectation.

"It wasn't like we were 6-10," he said earlier this summer. "We were 10-6. We expect to build off that. If we made a couple of plays here and there last year, we would've made the playoffs and who knows what would've happened . . . We'll make the plays this time and we'll get into the playoffs and we'll make a run."

That's usually not how it works here. In the last four years, including the 2007 Super Bowl season, the Giants have gone 31-14 in September, October and November for a winning percentage of .688. In regular-season games in December and January during that span, they have gone 9-10.

So yeah, finishing is an issue.

"That has been our Achilles' heel the last two years," Boley said. "We have had that tendency to come out on fire and not be able to sustain that throughout the course of the season. So for us, especially as a defense, to kind of keep things rolling and keep that intensity throughout the whole season [is a point of emphasis]."

And then there are the Eagles, the team that loaded up during the disjointed offseason and appears primed for a Lombardi Trophy push. The Giants have not beaten them since November 2008. Not since Plaxico Burress was playing for the team, to put that in perspective. Six straight games have been dropped to the rivals from down the turnpike, five of them decided by 12 points or fewer.

The Giants played the unimpressed role while the Eagles attacked free agency the way Andy Reid attacks a buffet. Even when Philadelphia snagged Steve Smith right from the Giants' grasp, they mostly shrugged about teams looking good on paper but not winning titles. The Giants made more references to the Dallas Mavericks than the Dallas Cowboys this preseason.

"They can be the 'Dream Team' as they call it and have all the guys down there that they want to," running back Brandon Jacobs said. "They had a good team before this offseason and they have a great team now. It doesn't really mean anything to me."

The Giants are more focused on their own business and their ability to get to the checkered flag at full speed and not with a limp. Coughlin knows more than anyone how important that is, which is why he's been harping on it from Day 1. He's driving the Giants to complete each task they undertake.

"Let the last drill be better than the first," he said. "Finish the practice in such a way that we can say we accomplished something, [that] we were better at the end than we were in the beginning."

Coughlin received a one-year extension after going 10-6 last season. But he knows that if the Giants fail to make the playoffs again, he's the one who will be finished.