Tom Rock: Giants find a way to win ugly game, and that's a pretty big development
Jameis Winston and the Giants found a way to beat the Titans on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
This is the way Giants football likely will be for the rest of the season.
It’s going to be ugly and grimy and not particularly fun to watch. It’s going to be nerve-wracking and terrifying and a tightrope of football sanity. It’s going to look as if they are playing in a nor’easter even when the skies are clear or they sneak inside a dome or two. It’s going to allow a clearly inferior team to come within moments of crushing the already fragile psyche of the locker room.
That’s what losing your promising young starting quarterback early in the second game of the season and having to reforge an identity on the fly — both as an offense and an organization — looks like.
Moving forward, there probably won’t be many stylistic moments to grasp for these Giants. But Sunday showed that even in those conditions, they could do something they haven’t been able to pull off in their recent past, not even when they were at full strength.
They won. They beat the Titans. They didn’t score a touchdown and they gained only 238 total yards, but they pulled out a 12-7 victory.
They saw the Titans drive the length of the field for a fourth-quarter touchdown and get within seven yards of a comeback win with 17 seconds left, but Jevon Holland intercepted a pass in the end zone to seal the Giants’ win.
“A year ago we lose that game, 100%,” Cam Skattebo said. “This year we were able to pull through.”
After the game, the players repeated that sentiment over and over.
“Let me ask you something, would the old New York Football Giants have won those games?” Jameis Winston asked the media after his first career win as a starter for the team and first win as a starter for anyone since 2024.
The answer, by the way, is a resounding “no.”
So maybe this, too, is what Giants football will be for the rest of the season. Manufacturing ways to win. Trying to avoid big mistakes and turnovers and looking for opportunities to force them on the other guys. Relying on punter Jordan Stout as a weapon and on rookie kicker Dominic Zvada to squeeze at least three points out of drives that should be sevens but at least aren’t zeros.
A week-to-week team in a week-to-week league just trying to figure out ways to remain relevant.
Do that long enough, and relevance becomes something else.
Reliability.
Before the game, John Harbaugh said he had several conversations with his confidants about which direction his squad would go.
“We’re going to find out a lot about ourselves as a football team,” he told those trusted ears.
It sure seemed as if they did.
“This was kind of a mental test for us,” Skattebo said. “Getting through this one, we really found our footing and found a little bit more of our identity mentally.”
Added offensive tackle Jermaine Eluemunor: “The culture that is being built for this franchise now, the people we have in place, are helping people on this team know what it takes to win, know what it takes to finish. I think we’re learning as a team how to win games.”
It’s worth noting that losing games like Sunday’s would not have been a “past few years” problem.
The last time they came away with a win without reaching the end zone and accumulating fewer than 300 total yards was a victory over Washington.
That was in 1976, and it was their first-ever victory at Giants Stadium. That game, by the way, also was sealed by a late interception in the end zone from the 7.
With any luck, they won’t have to do that again for another 50 years. But if they do, at least now they know they can.
“It’s a different team,” Andrew Thomas, the longest-serving Giants player on the roster, told Newsday. “A lot of different faces. New coach. A new season. We don’t focus on the past. Obviously, things haven’t been great here, but it’s a new season every year. We’re just working and trying to take advantage of every opportunity we get.”
The Giants didn’t quite do that on Sunday. They had multiple chances to put this game out of reach, dominating in every area for the first three quarters but sporting only a 12-0 lead to show for it. Then it was 12-7.
“I would have lost it if we had lost that game,” Eluemunor said.
Holland, who has been the best defensive player on the team this season, made sure they did not.
The loss of Jaxson Dart will hover over everything the Giants do for the next four (or maybe six?) months. And now the defense will have to get by without Brian Burns for a while, too, after he left the game with a serious-looking knee injury.
We’ll learn last week’s lesson and not make any presumptions about the exact severity of it before the MRIs come back, but it certainly did not look good.
Neither side of the ball will be as polished or exciting as it could have been, should have been, without them.
Yet despite those body blows, the Giants did not fold. Not this time. Harbaugh called it “an A-plus game” when it came to overcoming adversity and challenges, one of the few areas in which they seemed to excel.
“There is something to be said about that,” he said.
This year there certainly is.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
