The longer the game dragged on, and the more peril the Giants kept putting themselves in, this stopped being a pillow fight of a football game between two scuffling teams. This became a whole different time, and a whole different sport, a Jim Valvano special.
Survive and advance.
By the final desperate minutes, that’s all that mattered to the Giants. They had crunched the Commanders for so much of this game. Washington quarterback Sam Howell is going to see blue jerseys in his nightmares all week, because every time he looked up there were about six of them eager to feed him to the turf.
It sure felt like the Giants were up by about four touchdowns.
But they weren’t up by four touchdowns. It was 14-7. The Commanders had seized on one Giants mistake, a muffed punt return, to score their points. Now they had the ball again, as the shadows grew long and the mood of the home crowd inside MetLife Stadium grew testy and anxious. Saquon Barkley had fumbled, and so instead of taking a victory lap across the final few minutes of the game the Giants were merely trying to survive.
Survive and advance.
“We had to step up,” linebacker Kayvon Thibodeaux said. “We had no choice.”
They bent to the brink, bent all the way to fourth-and-5, Giants’ 7-yard-line, 1:04 left to go. Howell sprinted left. For a scary few seconds he had Jahan Dotson open. But Howell had been strafed by Giants rushers all day. At the worst possible moment — or best, depending on your point of view — he hesitated ever so slightly. He threw behind Dotson. The ball tickled Dotson’s fingers, but then safety Jason Pinnock clocked him.
And that, at last, was that.
“Closer than it needed to be,” Giants coach Brian Daboll said when this 14-7 rock fight was done. “I’ll take the result.”
They all will. They will take this and try to let the snowball build for the next seven days, and hope that next Sunday’s Gotham Showdown can serve as another building block to the rescuing and resuscitating of this season. It is now for certain that the Jets won’t be the only team with real stakes on the table next Sunday at 1 o’clock.
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The Giants will have to be better against the Jets, all phases, than they were against the Commanders. But it’s hard to believe they won’t be. Faced with a first genuine litmus test Sunday they got the lead on the Commanders, kept that lead, then saved enough in reserve to shoo away whatever negative thoughts might’ve been swirling in the imaginations of the 81,671 inside MetLife. They are 2-5. But they are 1-0 in their last one. From such modest roots must resurrections rise.
“We did a lot of good things, played a complementary game,” Daboll said. “But we left some stuff out there.”
Graham Gano missed a field goal early, and any time that happens you almost feel like your cable’s gone out. Barkley had that fumble late, when the Giants were at least ticketed for a field goal to make it a two-possession game.
Tyrod Taylor was terrific, 18-for-29 for 279 yards and the Giants’ first two home-field touchdowns of the season. In the first half alone he connected with five different receivers for gains of 20 yards or more. The offense hadn’t looked that efficient, or effective, going back to last year — at least until they started to run the four corners in the second half, playing a lot closer to the vest.
“Our goal is to protect the ball and put the offense in the best situation to move the ball down the field and score,” Taylor said. “I think we did that today.”
Taylor was good enough that if there isn’t going to be a full-blown quarterback controversy when Daniel Jones is healthy enough to play again, there’ll definitely need to be a legitimate quarterback conversation. Neither Daboll nor Taylor was particularly interested in taking a deep dive into those waters just yet.
That’s another discussion for another day.
Today’s topic?
Surviving. Advancing. There is still an awful lot of heavy lifting ahead for the Giants, beginning in six days with all of football New York in the house. There aren’t a lot of teams they would’ve beaten Sunday, but they didn’t have to beat those teams. They had to beat the Commanders. They did that.
Their fans wanted a bone tossed their way, a reason to believe. They got that. They are not yet buried. They are not yet dead. More football, important football, still awaits. That’s a win.
