The best-case scenario, from the start, was to be 2-2 a quarter of the way into the season. Two-and-two isn’t a record around which poems are commissioned. Two-and-two isn’t the most ambitious record; who likes to be at .500: win one, lose one, win one, lose one?
No crowd has ever chanted: “We’re 2-2! We’re 2-2!! We’re 2-2!!!”
Sometimes, though, it is the pathway to a record that tells a greater story than the record itself. A week ago, the Giants stood helpless as a place-kicker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Matt Gay, lined up a 34-yard field goal. Think about this: in 2018, NFL kickers attempted 501 field goals of 39 yards or shorter. They made 481 of them.
That’s 96 percent.
So the Giants had a 96 percent chance, a week ago, to fall to 0-3 on the season. Now, the good thing about pro sports is that there’s always someone who’s a little worse off than you, and even if the Giants had staggered into MetLife Stadium on Sunday at 0-3 they would’ve been greeted by the wondrous sight of the Washington Redskins, who are shaping up to be one of the great football calamities this side of … well, Florham Park.
The Giants looked terrific in pounding Washington 24-3, and even if they’d been coming in limping off a loss the perfect storm of a terrible Redskins roster, awful injuries and hideous quarterback play wouldn’t have made much difference.
Funny thing, though.
Gay missed the kick. The Giants won the game. And they are now on an honest-to-goodness winning streak, two in a row, and they’re at 2-2 after four games, if nobody is going to call ahead and reserve space along the Canyon of Heroes for them after reaching the epitome of mediocrity after four games, this did have a full feel-good shine to it, the whole day.
“This is where we hoped we’d be after today,” Giants coach Pat Shurmur said. “Two-and-two. Now we can take it from there.”
Sure, you can ignite the buzzkill any time you like simply by having a gander at the games coming up: Minnesota at home next week, the Patriots in New England the week after that, at Detroit, at Chicago, at Philly down the road, on and on an on.
You can point out that as one-sided as the score was — and the performance disparity between the teams was even greater than that — the Giants didn’t play an especially crisp game Sunday, turning the ball over four times, not looking near as efficient offensively as they did last week.
As even Shurmur himself conceded: “Against a team with more firepower than that team today those things [the two interceptions, the two fumbles] are killers.”If they’d even faced a quasi-competent quarterback instead of the two-headed monster of Case Keenum (who’s about to be non-person-ed in Washington) and Dwayne Haskins Jr. (who’s so green he should be wearing a Jets helmet) things might have been quite different.
But this Giants era is about defining small goals and fulfilling them, taking small steps and surpassing them. Week 2 of the Daniel Jones Era wasn’t quite the nonstop feel-good Hallmark card that Week 1 was but that, as much as anything, tells you about the mettle of a quarterback. In Detroit on Sunday, Patrick Mahomes didn’t throw a single touchdown pass yet he figured out a way to bring the Chiefs home.
The Giants scored their touchdowns on a Wayne Gallman reception, a Gallman run, a field goal and a pick-six that Jabril Peppers took to the house. Jones only built a QB rating of 78.0, but he made a batch of good throws, electrified the 74,149 inside MetLife with his legs a couple of times and, more important, looked like he’d been doing the job for years.
And the Giants defense — which looked so vulnerable the first three weeks you wondered if they’d eventually have to ask for a waiver to use 13 guys, suffocated the Redskins all day, turned them over four times (including two picks by Janoris Jenkins in a week he really needed them).
Again: No parades for doing this against the dreadful Redskins, same as there’ll be no parades for reaching sea level at 2-2. It’s easy to preach patience, harder to practice it. This may well be the high-water mark for the Giants this year. It’s also a moment when you can say: This is a team that’s better this week than it was last, and the week before, and the week before that.
When you’re assembling building blocks, that’s all you can really ask for.