Let’s go through the ‘Kudos & Wet Willies’ from Sunday’s latest New York Giants embarrassment, a 34-24 loss to the San Francisco 49ers that wasn’t nearly as close as the score might make you believe
Kudos to …
Brian
Burns — It felt like Burns, who entered the game tied for the league lead in sacks with 10.0, was trying to win the game by himself.
Burns had a sack/fumble, his 11th sack of the season, with :38 left in the half and the Giants trailing 17-7. The fumble was recovered by Abdul Carter at the 49ers’ 27-yard line. The Giants, though, could not score and went to the locker room still trailing by 10 points.
Burns finished with a sack, a forced fumble, a quarterback hit, a tackle for loss and four overall tackles.
If the rest of the defense playing as hard as Burns, maybe they wouldn’t have given up 105 points over the last nine quarters.
Rakeem Nunez-Roches — ‘Nacho’ did not have a great game, but it was clear from the plays he did make that the veteran tackle was giving effort. That counts for something the way the rest of the defense looked. He ended up with his second sack of the season, six tackles, a tackle for loss and a quarterback hit.
Jaxson Dart — The rookie quarterback is doing everything he can. He just can’t play defense or make all of the plays on offense alone.
Dart completed 24 of 33 passes for 191 yards, and ran eight times for a team-leading 56 yards. He accounted for all three Giants’ touchdowns, passing for two and running for one.
Wan’Dale Robinson — Robinson caught nine passes for 46 yards. Yes, that is just 5.1 yards per reception. It isn’t Robinson’s fault, though, that the Giants had him on the Daniel Jones stick route plan and didn’t try to get the ball to him down the field at all.
The Giants clearly need more at wide receiver. New receiver Ray-Ray McCloud caught just one pass for 5 yards. His only target came in the fourth quarter with the score 27-10.
Wet Willies to …
Brian Daboll — Yes, the Giants were under-manned. That isn’t an excuse for a team being lifeless, having the same issues week after week, for running a simplistic, unimaginative game plan that looked like the Daniel Jones stick route offense and the first game of the preseason on defense. Oh, and what is with running Dart over and and over and over two weeks in a row in games that were hopelessly out of hand. The job is to develop him, not kill him.
The Giants are now 11-32 over the last 2½ years with Daboll at the helm. Injury-riddled at this point or not, it is a team that should be better than 2-7.
One more thing: All I could think of when the score was 20-7 in the third quarter, the Giants had fourth-and-goal at the 3-yard line, and Daboll chose to kick the field goal rather than play for the touchdown was Joe Judge at the end of his tenure coaching to keep scores respectable rather than actually trying to win games.
Run defense — Pitiful. The 49ers watched the Broncos and the Eagles run wild by running to the edge against the Giants’ defense the last couple of weeks, and did the same. San Francisco ran for 159 yards, and their dominance on the ground is not reflected by their 4.1 yards per carry average.
Giants’ players talked about execution and players doing what they are supposed to do after the game. Sadly, that was the same babble we have begun to hear week after week. Except the execution doesn’t get better.
Shane Bowen — I do not like to call for people to be fired, but Bowen should not have a job on Monday morning. The defensive coordinator is completely devoid of answers as to how to fix any of the myriad of issues plaguing a defense that was expected to be — at least — top 10-15 in the NFL this season and is, instead, among the league’s worst.
The run defense continues to be abysmal. The pass rush, aside from Burns, is disappointing. Aside from Cor’Dale Flott, the Giants can’t seem to cover. With Flott, Jevon Holland and Paulson Adebo missing Sunday’s game the Giants made San Francisco backup quarterback Mac Jones (19 of 24, 235 yards, 2 TDs) look like Tom Brady.
The defense, expected to be at least among the best 10-15 groups in the league, has been abominable. It doesn’t appear that the coordinator has any answers/
Dexter Lawrence — The star defensive tackle had a much-publicized spat with Giants great Carl Banks this week. Lawrence said Banks was “delusional” that teams didn’t respect him the way they used to. He also defended his play, which is not producing the statistics Lawrence has usually compiled, as “disruptive.”
Lawrence had another invisible game on Sunday. He had a single tackle, which went for a loss. Otherwise, he did not dent the stat sheet.
Lawrence said after the game that “everyone as an individual has to look at themselves.”
He also said in reference to his own performance that he “was getting a lot of knock back, a lot of push. Seeing a lot of doubles. Same stuff. Think I’m playing well, but gotta make more plays.”
Lawrence is the leader of the Giants’ defense. If he is going to lead any kind of turnaround, it would certainly help if he would look at himself and admit he hasn’t performed up to his standards this season.
Deonte Banks — The third-year cornerback was at the center of another play where his effort was being questioned. Here’s the play:
Maybe Banks was trying to strip the ball from Brian Robinson. Maybe. Getting run through was certainly a bad look. Running next to Robinson as he scored wasn’t a great look for Jarrick Bernard-Converse in his Giants debut, either.
Graham Gano — The Giants needed some sort of points after Burns and Carter combined for a fumble recovery that gave the Giants a chance to creep back into the game late in the half. Instead, Gano yanked a 45-yard field goal wide left.
Kwillies to …
Theo Johnson — The second-year tight end showed what he can be with a 15-yard touchdown catch on the Giants’ opening drive. Johnson not only caught the pass from Dart, but ran through a defensive back to score. Unfortunately, he also showed why so many Giants fans think Daniel Bellinger should be TE1 for the Giants by dropping a third-and-7 pass from Dart in the second quarter that would have been an easy first down.
Johnson now has four drops on the season, one in each of the past three weeks. He has now dropped nine of 86 targets over two seasons, a 10.5% drop rate.
That’s not good enough.
