This is bad. Real bad.
This offense is much worse than we thought it would be. The Giants were beat physically and mentally up front. There wasn’t a single pass that Eli Manning had where he looked comfortable in the pocket which led to 14 catches by Saquon Barkley. Even when the Giants kept in 7 to block, the Cowboys were able to put immediate pressure on Manning. The Cowboys ran Cover 2 all night and with constant pressure, you’ll never move the ball against that. We all knew our offensive line wasn’t good but it’s unbelievable to give up that amount of pressure on every single play along with the fact that it looked like we were calling plays that were extremely vanilla.
I swear it feels like the name we don’t say is calling plays
— Giants Nation (@GiantsNationNYC) September 17, 2018
Things look really bad for this Giants team, but I still stand by the decision of drafting Saquon Barkley. All of Giants Twitter was taking shots at the Giants front office for passing on Sam Darnold in April, but could you imagine putting a rookie QB (who played bad against the Dolphins) behind this offensive line without the safety blanket of Saquon who had 14 catches? We’d be calling him a bust 3 days ago. It’s extremely easy to be negative when things aren’t going good and overreact 2 weeks into a new regime and I refuse to do that.
As far as the defense goes, they looked great honestly. The bomb to Tavon Austin was really the only bad moment and with a guy that has as much speed as Tavon, that’ll happen from time to time so I don’t judge them off that one play. Other than that, we looked amazing. They were put in a bad spot because when Dak and the Cowboys have a comfortable league, they are a pretty conservative and a completely different offense. Also, Tyron Smith came back from injury and that makes a huge difference for how Dak and Zeke play.
Going forth, I don’t know what the Giants can do to be the “win now” team that most of thought we had this year. The only thing I can cling to is that offensive line is the one group that makes major strides during the season because of gaining better continuity and they could possibly start to help Flowers more. I’m close to giving up, but the eternal optimist in me won’t let me… were on to Houston.
Photo: Tim Heaitman/USA Today Sports
