Week 10, beginning with Thursday night’s game against the Washington Commanders, is a massive one for the New York Giants. What happens will tell us a great deal about how difficult the Giants’ path to their first NFC East title since 2011 will be.
Team Rankings gives the 5-2-1 Giants a 69.5% chance of winning the NFC East. The 4-5 Dallas Cowboys are at 24.0%, and the 2-5-1 Commanders are at just 6.4%.
The Giants are 1.5-point favorites to beat the Commanders Thursday night, per FanDuel Sportsbook.
The Cowboys host the 7-1 San Francisco 49ers, and Dallas is a 4.5-point underdog.
If the Giants win and the Cowboys lose, the NFC East standings will look like this:
Giants 6-2-1
Cowboys 4-6
Commanders 2-6-1
The Giants will have a 3½-game lead. In that scenario, if the Giants go a reasonable 3-5 over their final eight games, they would finish 9-7-1. Dallas would have to go 6-1 to get to 10 wins, which is what they would need to win the division since the Giants’ tie with the Commanders counts as half a victory.
I doubt even the most ardent of Cowboys fans would feel good about Dallas’s chances of pulling that off.
If the Giants lose Thursday and Dallas upsets the 49ers, this is what the NFC East would look like:
Giants 5-3-1
Dallas 5-5
Washington 3-5-1
Dallas would be just 1.5 games back, and the Commanders would be back in the hunt with eight games remaining.
So, this week could provide a massive swing for the Giants.
Giants head coach John Harbaugh was speaking specifically about the Commanders when he said the following, but the idea he was getting at applies to the week and the division as a whole:
“This is for all the marbles. It’s a tie right now. This is the tiebreaker. It’s like going to the second half tied, you have a chance to go win the game right now and be one up on these guys for the rest of the season. So, it’s a big game.”
Here are the schedules for the Giants and Cowboys after Week 10:
Here are a few more things I am thinking about entering the game.
Dealing with Daniels
The unscripted quarterback run has hurt the Giants all season, never more than it did in Week 5 against Washington when Jayden Daniels ran for 38- and 26-yard touchdowns.
After that game, defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson said those runs “should never have happened.”
The difficulty for the Giants, especially with Wilson dialing up as much pressure as he has been in recent weeks, is that they play a lot of man-to-man in the secondary. That means the defensive backs don’t have eyes on the quarterback.
They have also only used a spy on the quarterback sparingly. It will be interesting to see how the Giants adjust their approach on Thursday night. Or, if they adjust it at all.
Another slop-fest
The Week 5 game in Landover, Md. was a slop-fest played on grass in rainy, miserable conditions. This one promises to be a slop-fest played on Field Turf in rainy, miserable, cold conditions.
This is the Thursday night forecast for East Rutherford, N.J. from the National Weather Service:
Rain. Low around 40. North wind 9 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half an inch possible.
The Giants lost a chance to win that game when a glove-less Skattebo fumbled away a scoring opportunity in overtime. The Giants have fumbled 14 times this season, losing six. Four teams have more fumbles than the Giants, with the Packers, Patriots, Chargers, and Saints all having 15.
Ball security will be at a premium Thursday night. That has, obviously, not been a Giants’ strength this season. Thus, it is worth paying attention to.
Considering the likely conditions, it is also worth remembering that rookie placekicker Dominic Zvada went just 2 of 5 on field-goal tries against Washington the first time, missing from 50, 57, and 46 yards.
Cam Skattebo revenge game?
I wrote on Wednesday about Skattebo’s reaction to all the trade chatter about Jonathan Taylor.
Skattebo is a player who thrives on emotion, and he has a laundry list of things to fuel him against the Commanders:
- The highly publicized, and now failed, Taylor trade discussions.
- The reality that the NFL world knows the Giants have been looking for an upgrade from Skattebo as RB1 pretty much since John Harbaugh got the head-coaching job. The Giants were in on Kenneth Walker in free agency. They were connected to Jeremiyah Love in the draft. They aggressively pursued Taylor. They even made a call about Bijan Robinson.
- Missing Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, which would have marked his return to the place where he suffered his dislocated ankle in 2025.
- His costly fumble against the Commanders in Week 5, which led to his pseudo-benching in Week 6.
Let’s see if he can use all of that to jump-start a running game that clearly missed his presence on Sunday against the Eagles.
