I’m done! Why I’m breaking up with the Giants after 60+ years of fandom

To quote the intrepid mariner, Popeye the Sailor: “That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!” 

I grew up an unshakable Giants football fan. Good times, bad times. Allie Sherman to Ray Handley to Brian Daboll. I was No. 16, Frank Gifford, in the fall and winter, No. 16 Whitey Ford in the spring and summer. (I could stand in front of a mirror and become a lefty like Ford.) 

But it’s over. This past Sunday, after the Giants’ drag-arse loss at home to Washington, I filed for an open-ended separation. 

I’m not the most dignified boy on the block, but the Giants are now beneath my dignity. It wasn’t that the Giants lost or that I can no longer indulge Daniel Jones — when’s the last time he was able to set up in an uninvaded pocket? — but instead it’s the way they lose or occasionally win. 

It’s the way they behave. They’re as stomach-turning as the rest of preening, muscle-flexing, chest-beating players who comprise NFL teams — players with no sense of modesty, game circumstances and professionalism. 

Their devotion is to post-play TV cameras, slo-mo TV tape machines, TV advertisers and promo splicers who have determined for all of us that moving images of skilled football be replaced with tired sights of players in self-smitten, often rehearsed acts of all-about-me selfishness. 

During the week, they feed antisocial media with vulgarities, boasts, taunts, threats, semi-literacy and other reminders that their years spent in colleges were based on institutionalized fraud. 

The Giants’ swing toward the insufferable began in 2014 with the arrival of since-transient Odell Beckham Jr. — a talented but self-entitled brat who mimed a dog urinating in the end zone and was even banned from his college team’s activities after, as an NFL player, he tried to steal the scene by playing the center-stage fool in LSU’s national championship locker room. 

His full devotion to his profession was witnessed in the days before the Giants’ 2017 playoff loss to the Packers in sub-arctic Green Bay. Beckham joined fellow Giants wide receivers on a yacht off Miami for sun and fun and whatever followed. 

Against the Packers the following Sunday, Beckham was a game-changer. He dropped four passes. 

This past Sunday, receiver Darius Slayton, a six-year pro frequently identified as a Giants’ veteran leader, caught a fourth-quarter pass for a first down. The Giants were down, 21-7. So Slayton, to save clock time, quickly tossed the ball to the nearest official then sprinted back to huddle up. 

Right? 

Wrong. He slowly rose to perform a flamboyant but weary first-down-gesture bit, as if he’d just won the game. 

Also Sunday, during a time out and the Giants down, 24-18, Fox cameras found boastful rookie and No. 6-overall draft pick WR Malik Nabers killing time by standing on the Washington sideline having a merry chat with his LSU buddy and now Commanders QB Jayden Daniels. 

Fox’s Mark Sanchez: “Timing-wise, save this stuff for pregame and postgame, but during the game? I need [Nabers] locked in, preparing for a potential fourth-and-1, not jawing with his buddies on the field.” 

Unfortunately, Sanchez seemed uneasy speaking a conspicuous truth as he began and ended his comment with giggles, rather than agitated disbelief. 

But such devotion to team, sport and profession from Nabers should have arrived as a small surprise. This season, he recovered from a concussion by attending a rap concert, always a smart idea to best treat a head injury with loud pounding. But he then declared that it’s nobody’s business. 

He’s right. It is his business. Thus he’d better take better care of his business or he’ll be out of the business. 

Where is John Mara on what the Giants have become? A gracious gentleman, he must be sickened from what he sees. Why not read the riot act? Start with Daboll. 

Where are the media among know-better Giants of the recent past? Carl Banks, Phil Simms and Howard Cross must be embarrassed by their former team’s worsening absence of character and class. How could they not be? But don’t just do something, stand there! 

Or maybe Nabers represents another Robinson Cano canard. Cano didn’t run to first to avoid grounding into double plays, “but he was good in the clubhouse” — even if it’s the other team’s clubhouse. 

Scream machines make it hard to enjoy the game 

Show me a play-by-play man who screams for a living, and I’ll show you a guy who doesn’t know what he’s screaming about. 

Sunday, Bills QB Josh Allen threw a perfect pass near the Dolphins’ goal line that was dropped by receiver Keon Coleman. The ball was caught by a defender before it hit the ground. This was another of those “interceptions” that create wildly misleading QB passer rating stats, which nonetheless are posted and recited as controlled environment laboratory results. 

This one, as are so many, was not on the QB. 

But CBS’ scream-at-everything Kevin Harlan next hollered, “That was the second interception thrown in two weeks by Josh Allen!” He’d holler similar later in the game. 

The day before, Fox’s Gus Johnson prefaced the Ohio State-Penn State telecast with a lengthy, conspicuously overdone series of grunts, growls and hysterics that challenged viewers to last until kickoff. 

Then Johnson, demonstrating zero sense of game circumstances, continued to act as if he’d run out of engine sealant. 

But screaming over everything has become the mark of network excellence, the fast track to success. 

More bad than good out of Sanchez 

Sanchez is another game analyst stuck with how he arrived. After all, if any TV network had a wise man — a coach — who could pull the best, or even a bit better, from its hires, we’d all know by now. 

Sunday, throughout Commanders-Giants, Sanchez shared good, applicable observations on Fox. Early on he alerted us to how Daniel Jones fakes handoffs by “pulling it back” before running around the ends. Jones later scored on such a play. 

But Sanchez was so wedded to worthless clichés and superfluous speech that the good stuff quickly evaporated. 

Sunday, he chose, “The Giants are running the rock well,” over “running well.” “Cut” became, ugh, “stuck a foot in the ground.” “Time to throw” became “time to throw the football.” And late in the game we heard the uselessly vague, “Someone has to step up and make a catch.” 

If only he could tighten it up. Lose the genuine pigskin gibberish and speak as he more normally would when detached from a microphone. 

But that has become the national approach. Strive for mediocre and pedestrian. I know we know why, we just don’t know why. 

Do Division I colleges even bother to appoint academic advisors to teams? Issue library cards to recruits? 

Say, football fans, whatever happened to the “bubble screen”? Five years ago, it was all the rage among TV and radio analysts. Now? Vanished as if it never existed. 

Stood to reason that the University of North Florida women’s team beat Trinity Baptist, 146-53, on Wednesday (it was 85-18 at the half). With its game against Clinton College coming up, it was a look-ahead game for Trinity.