Giants fans are smarter than this — and, worse, they’ve become fluent in awful football. So they aren’t going to shake their fists at the sky and bemoan the bad luck that continually befalls their $160 million quarterback, and they sure aren’t going sling their bile at his well-meaning backup.
The quarterbacks didn’t lose this inexcusable tire fire of a football game.
That would be the whole team, players 1 to 53 and coaches beginning with Brian Daboll on down. The Raiders basically took a few sticks of TNT to their football operation a few days before this 30-6 calamity. They’d installed Antonio Pierce as head coach, moved a few other deck chairs around, seemed ready to settle into the tuck position.
And, instead, they obliterated the Giants. Eviscerated them. Embarrassed them. There have been a lot of lowlights so far in this season, in which the record now sits at 2-7. There have been a lot of games that felt over by halftime. Last week seemed to be rock bottom, the Giants somehow unable to finish off a game in which their win probability actually reached 99.6 percent.
Now, that loss to the Jets seems like a stand-up comedian doing 10 minutes of material before the lights go down and “The Exorcist” comes on the screen. Now, those brutal one-sided losses to the Cowboys, the 49ers, the Dolphins and the Seahawks feel like nail-biters. It was that gruesome. It was that gross. It was that grotesque.
“We’ve got to do a better job,” Daboll said.
He could’ve gone into specifics, but, then, what would be the point? The entirety of the football product Sunday afternoon at Allegiant Stadium was disjointed, dysfunctional and deplorable. Yes, once Jones went down clutching his knee just after the first play of the second quarter, it was going to be a struggle to get this win. It shouldn’t have been hard to ask the rest of the team to make it as hard on the Raiders as it was on the Jets last week.
Instead, there was nothing hard about it.
The Giants were already down a touchdown when Jones hurt himself. The Giants’ defense — which the past two weeks inspired the poets among us to try and come up with a fitting nickname — was trampled by Aidan O’Connell, who sounds like he should play rhythm guitar for the Dropkick Murphys. Instead, he clinically cut up that proud Giants D.
It was 24-0 before halftime. Tommy DeVito, the Bubble Wrap off, threw a pair of killer interceptions that all but put the finishing touches on the slaughter. He did throw a TD pass in the second half; he also spent most of the day running for his life because the Giants’ offensive line was reduced to a row of rusty turnstiles and allowed eight sacks.
“We need to go back and look at the tape and get ready to play next week,” Daboll said. “We’ll be ready to play on Sunday.”
The bad news is that will mean playing in Dallas, against a Cowboys team that will clearly be extra salty after losing Sunday’s showdown in Philadelphia with the Eagles. You may recall that the last time those two teams were on the same field, it did not go well, with a 40-0 Cowboys win that set an unfortunate tone for a Giants season that really did begin with a great deal of promise.
Now?
Even this past week, there were some hopeful voices that looked around the NFC and asked: why can’t the Giants make a run? Jones was coming back. Andrew Thomas was coming back. The Raiders were in chaos. Sure. Why couldn’t the Giants get a little momentum and get things turned in the right direction?
That’s gone now. That’s dead. A lot of the postgame talk centered around Jones’ teammates feeling terrible for his career taking a sour turn again, and all that does is reinforce that for all the losing, this Giants’ roster really is full of solid guys and accountable players who only want the best for each other. It was understandable. Better to offer empathy for a friend than to empty the thesaurus with words describing what had just happened in the Vegas desert. There was a long flight home for that.
“It definitely sucks,” said Saquon Barkley, one of the few Giants who produced Sunday, gaining 90 yards on 16 carries and catching three balls for 23 yards despite the Raiders — like the Jets last week — knowing he was probably touching the ball on almost every play. “You’ve got to be a pro about it, can’t make excuses. We still have a long season ahead of us. I’m not happy we’re 2-7.”
Sadly, Barkley knows what lies ahead for Jones if it’s a torn-up knee. Just as regrettably, he knows too well what it’s like to play out the string of a lost season. But after a lost Sunday in Nevada, that’s the only thing in his — and the Giants’ — future.
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