Giants know they have to be “ready to go” from the beginning
Week 1, 2023 — Dallas Cowboys 40, New York Giants 0.
After that embarrassment the Giants went 2-8 en route to a 6-11 season.
Week 1, 2024 — Minnesota Vikings 28, Giants 6.
The Giants won just once in their first four starts and sank as low as 2-13 en route to a 3-14 season.
Head coach Brian Daboll doesn’t need to be reminded how the last two seasons, which ended up with the team going a combined 9-25, started for the Giants.
During Wednesday’s season-opening press conference before the first practice of training camp, I reminded him of those two awful starts, anyway, and before I had finished my question he said “yeah.”
What I wanted to know from the embattled fourth-year coach is whether he would do anything noticeably different during this training camp to try and change those awful early-season results.
There is, of course, no magic formula that produces the start — and the overall results — a team wants.
“We’ve changed on a yearly basis and we think we have a process set in place with the players that we have right now to be ready to go,” Daboll said. “We’re going to have to be, but it’s the first day, as Joe [Schoen] just mentioned, we have a long 30 days or whatever it is. We play a preseason game in 15 days, I think.
“But our focus is going to be on us and the improvements that we need to make and like I said, I like the additions that we’ve added to our football team. Personalities, competitiveness of these players, some of which played in the league at a high level and the young players that we’ve added. So again, it takes time to build the team here. This is the time to do it in training camp, learn from mistakes, grow each day and continue to improve all the way up until the start of the season.”
Some of that is coach-speak gobbledygook, but Daboll clearly understands the assignment. The first four games are at the Washington Commanders, at the Dallas Cowboys, against the Kansas City Chiefs and against the Los Angeles Chargers. Three of those teams made the playoffs and the Cowboys, who went 7-10, beat Daboll’s Giants twice. Six of the Giants first eight games are against 2024 playoffs teams, including two against the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles.
Daboll addressed the importance of a fast start, and the importance of players also understanding the assignment, during mandatory minicamp last month.
“We have to hit the ground running,” Daboll said at the time. “When training camp hits, I don’t have much tolerance for mistakes during training camp. The season is getting close, so we have to be prepared mentally, and we have to be prepared physically.”
There is, of course, no magic formula. No one-size-fits-all perfect way to prepare a team for a season, or to make them go from 3-14 a season ago to ready to handle the gauntlet they face at the beginning of this season.
The Giants believe they are better.
“Everything is new each year. We like the guys we’ve brought in, the additions, we like the draft picks that we’ve had, how they’ve worked,” Daboll said. “I like how we competed in the spring, so I’m looking forward to training camp. This is the start of the season. We’ve got a long way to go. Got a lot of things we got to continue to improve on day by day with the goal to be ready to go at the start of the season.”
GM Joe Schoen isn’t making any predictions. Baited with an “are you a playoff caliber team?” question, he demurred.
“We’re just starting camp today,” Schoen said. “I understand the question, but the expectation is we’re going to be a competitive team, a competitive roster. And again, all that starts today.”
I have made the point several times that I believe a case can be made that the Giants are better, or at least potentially better, at every position across the roster. Schoen wasn’t ready on Wednesday to make a similar claim.
“We’ll see. Just going into day one, there’s some young guys that we’ve just seen in shorts and t-shirts, so once the pads come on, interior O-line, D-line, we will get a chance to see how those guys do when the pads come on,” he said. “We feel good about where the roster is right now with the 91 players that we have with the international exemption. Now is when the competition really begins over the next few weeks in training camp and I’m looking forward to that. We like the 91 we have now. We’re always going to be looking if there’s transactions or some of these cuts or trades, whatever it is, we’re always going to look to do what’s best for the team.”
On Wednesday, in shorts and t-shirts during a 90-minute workout, there wasn’t a perceptible difference in the energy and enthusiasm of practice from other years. There may have been a couple of wrinkles in the drills, but nothing that looked or felt massively different.
A noteworthy difference, though, was Daboll — with offensive coordinator Mike Kafka handling play-calling — handling practice more like he did before last season. Checking in with a variety of position groups, working the stretch lines to chat with and encourage as many players as he could. Being present in as many places as he could.
Dexter Lawrence, who has experienced just one playoff season in six years, spoke about challenging the defense to be what its press clippings say it should be.
“I try to challenge everybody to prove themselves every day, even myself. Prove who we can be,” Lawrence said. “Yesterday I challenged the defense. They want to talk about our D-line and all this, but we haven’t done anything yet and we have to come out here every day and improve and get better and challenge each other and just work and be critical and be coachable.”
As great as his rookie year was, only three wide receivers committed more penalties than Malik Nabers last season. All six of his penalties (five illegal shifts and one false start) were preventable pre-snap violations. On a team with little margin for error, those mistakes are costly.
Nabers said Wednesday that he needs to “clean up a lot of little mental errors.”
Nabers also spoke about the impact of last season’s struggles as a team.
“Losing is part of the game. There’s failure with the championships that have been won. There’s failure with the greats,” Nabers said. “You’ve always got to take a step backwards in life sometimes to move forward, so I mean that was just my step back.
“I come from a winning program, but I’ve got to take this winning program here now, to be a leader myself, to get guys going with me. That’s how you create a winning atmosphere around here and I feel like (those are) the steps that we’re taking this year. The guys upstairs, management, the team, Dabs, upstairs did a great job of putting more leaders in this building and moving forward I’m really having a good feeling about this upcoming season.”
The Giants clearly understand what they need to do. Be prepared when the season begins. Get off to a better start. Don’t bury themselves before the season is one-quarter over.
Can they complete the mission? Or, is it impossible? Perhaps the next month will give us a hint.