Can New York Giants Avoid Loser Fatigue?

The mood in the New York Giants locker room is one of disappointment over having come close but not close enough to snap the years-long dominance held over them by the Dallas Cowboys.

No one is throwing in the towel over a season that stands at 1-3 through the first quarter, a quarter traditionally viewed as the period in which teams stand to define who they are.

However, as the disappointments pile up, Giants head coach Brian Daboll, who has been down this road before, must ensure his young team doesn’t throw up its hands and pull back on spinning its wheels.

“I just focus on the next week. That’s what you have to do,” Daboll said when asked if there was a concern about his young squad experiencing loser’s fatigue. 

“It’s a long season. Each week is different. I think there are a lot of improvements being made. It’s not showing in the results. There’s things that are getting worked on and showing up on tape.”

You’ll recall that the Giants went through this last year, Daboll’s second season as head coach. But despite the team’s 6-11 record, the squad never quit fighting, perhaps a result of realizing how an unusual rash of injuries that saw four different kickers, three different quarterbacks, and at least six different offensive line combinations wreaked havoc with the on- and off-field chemistry teams rely on.

This year has been different. At least so far, the Giants have one game they can point to as the model for how the rest of the season should go: Week 3 against the Browns. 

And a case could be made that the Giants’ result might have been different if they had had a healthy place-kicker the previous week.  

The glass-half-full people might even point to the fact that the Giants, who were blown out of the water by the Vikings in Week 1, kept it close against the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday night, a team that last year dominated them in both regular-season meetings.

But this is football, not horseshoes, where coming close isn’t good enough.

“I’m not getting no petty wins,” nose tackle Dexter Lawrence II said after the loss to Dallas in which, for the second game this season, the offense failed to get into the end zone. 

“Whoever won on the scoreboard, that’s the game. I don’t give a damn about a petty win. That’s football. We come here to score points to win and stop them on defense. We didn’t do that, and they beat us.”

“We don’t feel good about losing,” added quarterback Daniel Jones. “We didn’t do enough to win, and we’re frustrated. We’re not discouraged. We’re still confident in our team and what we can do, but we don’t feel good about losing.”

The Giants don’t seem to have any answers, particularly on offense. After averaging 15.6 points per game last season, the Giants, after changing the play-caller from offensive coordinator Mike Kafka to Daboll, are currently averaging only 15 points per game. 

“Things can flip in a hurry,” said receiver Wan’Dale Robinson. “It’s all on us, and we know that we’ve just got to go out there and do our jobs. There are a couple more plays out there that need to be made, and the outcome of these games will be a little different.”

Daboll indicated there has been progress made with this team, yet when asked what the Giants could hang their hats on, he couldn’t–or wouldn’t–answer the question.

“I’ve been part of a lot of teams that have won a lot of games,” he said. “Again, the teams that I’ve been part of, it’s a week-to-week deal, and you have to keep improving as the season goes, and again, there’s things that we’ve improved on and things that we need to continue to improve on.”

Robinson agreed that there has been progress, but like his head coach, he didn’t offer any specifics other than to opine that the team is “close” to getting on the right track. 

“We can go in there, and we watch it, and we see how close we are and know that there’s just little things, little details that we’ve got to clean up,” he said. 

“That’s what this long week is for. The first quarter of the season’s over with, so we’ve just got to make sure that we’re better from here on out.”

Robinson was pressed for why he felt so confident in the Giants being able to turn things around.

“I know the type of guys we have here,” he said. “I know they want to go in and work. Everybody feels like it was on them. So, it just shows that everybody cares and wants to get this thing right. 

“We see it out there on the tape. It’s just one little detail–maybe one little thing, one little block. Us as receivers, making that one catch. We know it’s right there for the taking.” 

Based on that feedback and that of some other players in the postgame locker room, no one is giving up the ship just yet, not after four games.  

“You’ve got to be mentally strong in this business and be able to push through the tough times, manage the good times when there are good times, keep correcting things, and do better the next week,” Daboll said.

But with something new popping up each week and with the Giants proving time and again that they’re not at the point where they can overcome the plethora of mistakes–the missed tackles, the dropped passes, the missed throws, and blown scoring opportunities–the Giants’ 2024 season hangs on a thread.

And if they don’t get all these issues they feel have been holding them back cleaned up, it’s going to get late extra early this year in East Rutherford.