The great Vince Lombardi, a Giant assistant coach once before he went off to make history in Green Bay, is often credited with saying that hope is not a strategy. But it sure feels that way right now as the Giants head to Denver and try to build on what they did ten days ago against the Eagles. Because for the first time in a very long time, there is some hope again around the Giants.
Now we see if it is hope that might carry them for the next several years and not just the next several weeks. We will begin to find out in Denver, against a Broncos team that the Jets should have beaten in London last Sunday, if Jaxson Dart and Cam Skattebo have a chance to be something more than shooting stars.
We are going to find out if what we saw against the Eagles — a game in which the Giants were hoping to be competitive before running the defending champs all the way out onto Route 3 — really was the beginning of a real season, even without Malik Nabers. We are going to see if Dart can do it again with Sean Payton’s defense waiting to ambush him; and if Skattebo can continue to back-flip the script about the Giants having no running attack of consequence. We are going to see if this Giants defense can do it against Bo Nix at Empower Field at Mile High the way they did it to Jalen Hurts and Saquon Barkley at MetLife.
We see if Dart can win his third game as a starter, and get the Giants to as many victories on the second-to-last Sunday in October as the Giants won all of last season. Yeah. They finished 3-14 a year ago. Now they have a shot at being 3-4 leaving Denver. They’ve already beaten one AFC West contender in the Chargers. Now they try to beat one of the best defenses in the sport, in a hard place to play, coming off the biggest regular-season win they’ve had since the last Super Bowl against the Patriots.
Dart and Skattebo took apart Vic Fangio’s defense the Thursday night before last. Now they try to do the same to the Broncos defense of Vance Joseph, which last Sunday scared Justin Fields half to death. But whatever happens in Denver, Giants fans are still as excited about their team as they have been in years, across the eight years when the Giants have been one of the two worst records in the NFL along with the Jets.
The kid quarterback from Ole Miss, Dart, is having a minute, isn’t he? And Giants fans just saw Skattebo throw the kind of charge into MetLife Stadium that Saquon once did when nobody could tackle him. On top of all that, they watched Giant defenders get after a Super Bowl quarterback — for one Thursday night that felt like more — the way old Giant defenders once got after Tom Brady.
Will this last even to the end of October? There is no way of knowing that. Do a few hot games out of the blocks mean that Dart is going to do, at least in the short run, what Jalen Brunson did for the Knicks? Well, we are about to find out. But what matters for now is that people are talking about the Giants again. People want to watch the Giants again. Even a few weeks of Dart throwing it around and running around have made the football season around here feel like something more than a speed bump between the end of baseball and the beginning of the Knicks.
And imagine what people would be saying and thinking about these Giants if they hadn’t blown that lead against the Saints, after the upset of the Chargers and before the upset of the Eagles. Imagine what the record might look like if Russell Wilson had managed to close the deal against the Cowboys a few weeks ago.
But the Giants are where they are. We find out against the Broncos more about who they are, after a period around here, for Giants fans, as bleak as the ’70s once were, as they became as dreary a product in pro football as the Knicks were in pro basketball for so much of this century before Leon Rose got here and Tom Thibodeau and, blessedly, Brunson and the other kids from Villanova. You know who the Giants have largely been since the last Super Bowl? They have been what the Yankees once were when Stump Merrill was the manager; what the Mets were back in the ‘90s when they were the Worst Team Money Could Buy.
The Giants have been what the Jets still are.
Oh, sure. That game the Jets lost in London last Sunday? Giants fans know all about losses like that, under Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge and even Brian Daboll once things got sideway for Daboll after he got the Giants into the playoffs that one time. It feels as if Giants fans have endured an entire decade of losses like that, when they were the ones with quarterbacks who couldn’t come close to hitting what they are aiming at even when they had the time.
These were the Giants, who had won four Super Bowls in their history and played in one other. These were the Giants, who took out Brady and Bill Belichick twice, once when the Patriots were trying to become the first team in pro football history to go 19-0. And yet somehow they had, along with the Jets, become the kind of team that gets you relegated in English soccer.
Are they in the clear because they’ve won a couple of games? Of course not. Even Giants fans who still hope for the best have become conditioned to accepting the worst. But Dart has shown arm and speed and flair and promise in his best moments. And Skattebo, a charming kid himself, has looked like a whole lot more than the 105th pick in the draft. Giant fans can only dream about what this offense will be like when Nabers, as gifted a wide receiver as they’ve ever had, is healthy again.
The Broncos will be the ones trying to stuff Skattebo now. They will try to force Dart to keep finding open guys who don’t wear No. 1. The Giants? They will try to keep the line moving against another quality opponent, and as a touchdown underdog. And keep hope alive for another Sunday. Hope may not be a strategy for Giants fans. But it sure beats the alternative, doesn’t it?
SHOHEI IS ONE OF ONE, YOU CAN’T QUARTERBACK THE JETS & SAY A HAIL MARY FOR AARON …
We come to sports for nights like Friday night in Los Angeles, hoping that we might see something we’ve never seen before, even from a player the likes of which we will never see again.
And what we saw was the greatest individual game — from Shohei Ohtani, the most gifted player baseball has ever known — in the history of the postseason.
Three home runs, the second one nearly over the moon.
Ten strikeouts.
Doing all of that on the night when his team won the pennant and punched a ticket back to the World Series.
Even Babe Ruth, to whom we routinely compare Ohtani, never hit a home run in a World Series game in which he was the starting pitcher for the Red Sox.
In the end, Ohtani really isn’t the modern-day Ruth.
He is one of one.
And just proved it again against the Brewers in Game 4, when he hit three out of Dodger Stadium and struck out the world.
More than anyone in professional sports right now, he is the one to watch.
Truly, there is only one player who might someday do what he did on Friday night:
The player who just did.
Broke the Brewers, broke the internet.
There are two holdovers for the Yankees since the start of the 2018 season, not including the general manager and the manager.
Aaron Judge is one.
Giancarlo Stanton is the other.
So it is eight years since Brian Cashman swung his big blockbuster deal for Stanton, pivoting to him and his 59 South Florida home runs after being rejected by Ohtani.
And you tell me what Yankee fan would get into the wayback machine and want to make that particular trade all over again.
So Sam Darnold is playing like a star in Seattle, after doing the same in Minnesota last season.
Aaron Rodgers is looking an awful lot like Aaron Rodgers again, and Uncle Joe Flacco outplayed Rodgers when the Bengals were beating the Steelers on Thursday night.
So they can all obviously play quarterback.
They just couldn’t play quarterback for the Jets.
Just when Penn State gets clipped for $49 million after firing James Franklin, what does Indiana do?
That school turns around and gives their coach a deal for twice that much.
Speaking of big money in sports, here is one more thing about Ohtani:
He continues to look like a $700 million bargain, doesn’t he?
Hey, I’m so old I can remember when people were still talking about Ohtani being in an October slump.
Out of that big fat $300 million-plus payroll of the Yankees, $44 million of it was paid to Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and Marcus Stroman.
The only professional pitching that the Mets new hitting coach, Jeff Albert, ever faced was in the Frontier League.
St. John’s is still under the salary cap, right?
We found out one thing for certain the other night when Rodgers chucked it 70 yards on the last play of the game:
There has never been and will never be anyone better at throwing a Hail Mary ball than he is.
So, like, the Browns didn’t need Flacco?
The CLEVELAND Browns?
When does Trump send the National Guard in on the Jets?
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