“We’re going to be in this thing until the end now.”
That was New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh after Sunday’s stunning 27-21 overtime victory over the Houston Texans.
The words got my attention. Because they, stunningly, feel like the truth.
The Giants are 4-2-1 and leading the NFC East. They will still be leading the division after the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys, both 2-4, play on Monday Night Football.
The outside world can, and will, snicker at the NFC East. They can, and will, snicker at the Giants.
It is hard to blame them.
The Eagles have had a stunning fall. They are without Jalen Hurts for the remainder of the season, and the situation surrounding his blood clots could embarrass both the Eagles and the NFL. They have myriad injuries beyond Hurts, and an offensive line that does not resemble the dominant one they possessed not long ago.
The Cowboys are, well, the Cowboys. In the current landscape, they probably have the most talent in the division. They keep, though, doing things Cowboys teams have done for three decades. Consequently, they keep falling short of expectations.
The Washington Commanders are 1-4-1, winless in three tries in the division, and don’t seem to be able to tell time. They seem to be marking time at this point until owner Josh Harris fires head coach Dan Quinn.
The Giants? It is pretty clear that nearly halfway through the season they are the only team in the division that feels good about itself. Why not?
- The Giants are already on their third starting quarterback, with their No. 1 — Jaxson Dart — out for the season. That’s usually a death knell for NFL teams. J.J. McCarthy, though, is clearly not an ordinary No. 3 quarterback, and he and the Giants appear to be a match. Maybe someone should tell Kevin O’Connell, whose team is somehow 6-0 without good quarterback play, that he might have traded the Giants his best QB.
- The Giants have lost defensive star Brian Burns for the season. They have also lost starters Tremaine Edmunds and Chauncey Golston, and never had 2025 starting defensive tackle Roy Robertson-Harris.
- A year ago, the Giants kept spitting the bit and turning victories into losses. This year, they keep finding heroes and winning games at the wire.
The Giants now get to go into their bye week in first place. They will also come out of it in first place, as the best the Eagles and Cowboys could do is get to 4-4 before the Giants return to action.
“It’s a massive energy shot in the arm. It’s a reward,” Harbaugh said after the game. “Now, you’ve got to make something of it. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t build on it, right? But it means something, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to win a championship yet. It means we have an opportunity, though.”
When the Giants return from their bye, they will face the Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field and then host the Commanders.
“We have an opportunity to get ready for the next two games starting with Philadelphia, and then a quick
turnaround, so we’ll be thinking about two games as a coaching staff over the bye week,” Harbaugh said. ”The two most important games of the season will be coming up after we come back from the bye, which will set the direction for the rest of the season, really. But we’re going to be in this thing until the end now. This was a pivotal game. This was a really high-pressure game for our team. We didn’t talk about that, but they all knew how important this game was, and they responded accordingly.”
‘Failure is not final’
Nothing really seems to shake the belief of this Giants team. That belief was built in the summer heat, when Harbaugh worked his team harder and longer than most NFL players are accustomed to being worked in an NFL that is much softer than it once was.
Harbaugh’s team faced plenty of challenges leading up to Sunday’s game, not the least of which was going winless in its previous two games.
- Harbaugh changed quarterbacks despite Jameis Winston having lost just once in four starts. He said it was an “obvious choice” to go with McCarthy, but it could have backfired.
- To pare down the four-way timeshare Najee Harris complained about a week ago, Harbaugh cut Harris.
- Cam Skattebo was coming off a week in which he was taught a lesson the hard way, getting just six snaps and no touches.
- Defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson took the highly unusual public step of calling some of his players “traitors” for lack of effort against the New Orleans Saints. One of those traitors, Jihad Ward, was cut.
- The Giants lost Edmunds for the season during the week, and played Sunday without two starting defensive backs.
Yet, the Giants went in to Houston as 10.5-point underdogs, made it clear from the start that they were playing to win, and came out with a critical, confidence-building victory.
“I think that’s exactly the story. To me, that’s the point,” Harbaugh said. “It tells you who they are. You might have thought before the game, we’re going to find out about our guys. We’re going to find out about who they are, and we did, and you saw it. They did; they took the bull by the horns, and they got the job done.”
Up until now, analysts and fans of other NFC East teams have looked at the Giants and said, basically, yeah, they’re in first place, but the Giants can’t really win the division. Can they?
Maybe they will win it. Maybe they won’t. But it looks like everyone is going to have to get used to the idea that it actually is a possibility.
That reality is starting to settle in for at least some analysts.Queue ESPN’s Dan Graziano on Sunday night:
No one has wanted to take this seriously, but the first-place Giants are 4-2-1 and will carry at least a 1.5-game NFC East lead into Week 8 regardless of what happens between the Cowboys and Eagles on Monday night. Harbaugh has made a major difference in his first season as Giants head coach. They’re avoiding mistakes, overcoming injuries, and finding ways to win. Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy called an outstanding game for McCarthy. Skattebo bounced back after last week’s soft benching and said after the game that he agreed with and appreciated the way it was handled by the coaching staff. Edge rusher Abdul Carter basically dominated the second half on defense. Cornerback Deonte Banks shadowed Nico Collins effectively.
The Giants are playing very good team football right now. Given what we saw in Minnesota, McCarthy is a tough guy to count on. But he’s also talented enough to have been picked 10th in the 2024 NFL draft, and it’s entirely possible that what he needed was a new situation. There is a world where he flops completely. There is a world where he’s inconsistent the rest of the way, and the Giants don’t have enough around him to cash in. But there’s also absolutely a world in which he and they play just well enough to win a bad NFC East. Right now, the math tells us that it’s absolutely possible, and the Giants are the betting favorite to win their division.
Harbaugh was asked Sunday when he realized his team had the mental fortitude to handle getting knocked down.
“I would say just a lot of moments stacked on top of each other because they just didn’t bat an eye and they continued to work hard and fight,” he said. “Every type of situation, they met the same way. Maybe it started with [QB] Jaxson Dart, then it went to the next, the next, the next, to [ILB] Tremaine Edmunds this week.
“I don’t know, I just think it’s an ongoing type of a thing. That’s how you build — it’s shared experiences. It’s fighting through all these things together that draws people close together, and that’s how a team is built.”
The new quarterback is also a survivor. A former first-round pick banished to third-string in Minnesota and traded away without hesitation.
“Guys have scars. He [McCarthy] has scars. He’s been wounded. He’s been broken. He’s been battered. But you heal stronger, and you become better because of it,” Harbaugh said. “So he should be grateful. Okay, I won a National Championship, got a high pick for the Minnesota Vikings, was the guy after they let the veteran quarterback go to Seattle, fought my way through, but it ended up not working out for me, got benched, got ridiculed, got traded. Got traded, good. Good on every single one of those counts because it’s made me stronger. It’s made me who I am if I’m of the character to understand that.
“That’s how life works. That’s why I love football as a metaphor for life, for kids watching. That’s a lesson for everybody. Failure is not final. Isn’t that a saying somewhere? Help me out. There’s a great quote there on that one. Look it up; it’s a good one. To me, that just shows who he is as a man, as a young man”
These Giants have scars. Some are surgical. Some are from failures they have already experienced this season. They keep moving forward, which, as Rocky Balboa would say is “how winnin’ is done.”
Turns out, “failure is not final” is a modification of another quote by Harbaugh favorite Winston Churchill:
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
The Giants have shown that. They keep picking themselves up no matter how many players or games they lose. It is why they most likely will be in the hunt for the NFC East title to the end. Whether or not anyone else is ready to believe.
