The off-season is the time for hope among sports fans.
Every possible future is still open before them, and we never know what Schrödinger’s season has in store for us until the games are played.
But right now, most New York Giants fans are a very hopeful lot as Week 1 gets under way. And as it always seems to happen, the Giants are preparing to play the Dallas Cowboys to open the season.
We’ll find out if the Cowboys can live up to their pre-season hype, and whether the Giants are being unfairly dismissed,
soon enough. But for now, we had just one simple question for Giants fans ahead of Sunday night’s matchup: Will the Giants beat the Cowboys?
The majority — and a significant majority at that — of Giants fans are expecting a win to start the season.
The Giants are 3-point underdogs at home coming into the game (per FanDuel), up from 2.5-point underdogs after the preseason and meaning they would be considered 6-point underdogs on a neutral field. Still, most Giants fans believe their team is being dismissed and is primed to shock the NFL world.
The sentiment seems to be that the Giants earned their wins over the Chargers and Eagles a year ago, and their near-victories over the Broncos, Lions, and Bears weren’t flukes. In short, they believe new head coach John Harbaugh that the Giants have the talent to compete right now.
There are, of course, plenty of pessimists around who don’t believe a rapid turnaround is possible. They instead seem to buy into the belief that the Giants are fundamentally flawed and need a complete teardown and rebuild before they can compete with the best in the NFL — or the Cowboys, for that matter.
(Yes, that was a not-so-subtle dig at Dallas, who have plenty to prove themselves.)
We’ll find out who’s right over the coming days and weeks.
For right now, however, Giants fans are confident. All but the most pessimistic fans seem to believe that the Giants are heading in the right direction as we enter 2026. John Harbaugh and Joe Schoen seem to have coalesced around a shared vision of the team, and are building towards it with a purpose and conviction we haven’t seen in a long time.
A full 95 percent of Giants fans are confident that the team is headed in the right direction as we enter Week 1. That puts Giants fans in the same realm of confidence as Patriots, Seahawks, Chargers, and Broncos’ fans. The other fanbases know that they have playoff caliber teams who expect to be in championship contention. Giants’ fans, meanwhile, are by far the most confident of the teams with poor records in 2025. Giants fans are even more confident than the fans of the “good but not great” teams.
Is it overconfidence? Last year fan confidence was at 92 percent after a phenomenal preseason performance. Again, we’ll find out over the coming weeks. For now, however, vibes are good among Giants’ fans.
