The Giants take no comfort in their narrow loss to the Cowboys

A reporter tried to offer a lifeline to New York Giants defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence by asking about the Giants’ moral victory against the Dallas Cowboys, to whom they lost their seventh straight game, 20-15, after eliminated in two games last year with an overall record of 89-17.

Lawrence, however, was having none of it.

“NO. “I’m not going to have small victories,” he said after the game. “Whoever won on the scoreboard, that’s the game. I don’t care about a small victory. This is football. We come here to score points “To win and stop them on defense, we didn’t do that and they beat us.”

Quarterback Daniel Jones agreed.

“No, we don’t feel well. “We don’t feel good when we lose,” he said. “We didn’t do enough to win and we’re frustrated.”

They are both right because a defeat is a defeat, whether by one point or by 100 points. The loss dropped the Giants to 1-3 on a night when they simply didn’t do enough to win, the story of the last few years of this franchise’s 100-year history.

Perhaps aware that the results weren’t good enough for the thousands of fans who continue to pour money into a team they hope will be competitive, only to have their hearts broken, head coach Brian Daboll tried , to offer a ray of hope.

“Once again the result is terrible but I thought there was an improvement,” he said. “I think the results have continued to improve. Last week we also achieved the desired result; This week we didn’t, which is hurtful. It hurts, it hurts, you work your butt off.

“We had a nice short week. But we played the game the way we needed to. I just missed a few things. We have to do a better job in the running game, and that starts with me. But we tried different things; we couldn’t move much. So I thought the passing game was the way to do it.”

That’s not to take any credit away from the Cowboys, who needed a “real” game themselves, but given the results, all this talk about improvement, the Giants’ good week, etc. seems hollow.

If you can believe it, the Giants’ scoring offense is currently worse than last year’s group that featured three quarterbacks. The Giants are averaging 15 points per game through four games, compared to last season when they averaged 15.6 points.

In two of their three losses this season, they have failed to reach the end zone, a pace that, if kept up, will be the current red zone conversion rate of 50% this year (tied for 15th). Last year’s 44.19% put it in 31st place in the league.

The defense has been a little better this year as they now have a defensive coordinator who doesn’t believe it’s life and death with the Lightning. But figuring out how to truly strengthen the run defense remains a problem while the team’s CB1, Deonte Banks, continues to suffer through a second-year slump when facing the better receivers a CB1 can actually compete with.

“Every loss hurts,” Lawrence said emphatically. “I’m mad, but we just have to find a way to play better as a group. That’s the biggest thing and we need to play better as a group.”

“We’re not going to be discouraged,” Jones said. We still have confidence in our team and what we can do, but we don’t feel good when we lose.

Daboll and the players can preach about improvement all they want, but unless it’s visible on the field when it counts, their definition of improvement is true when compared to the numbers – and in practice, we’re talking about the win column – just don’t agree.

Run away

The Cowboys came into this game with the 32nd ranked run defense (185.7 yards per game) and had allowed 5.41 yards per rush attempt, also 32. Still, the Giants couldn’t find a way to take advantage, though They were equipped with a strong personnel package for most of the first half.

“They did a few things when we were in certain personnel groups where they brought weak safety and things like that,” Daboll said of the adjustments Dallas made to counter the Giants’ largely strong personnel grouping.

“I thought they did a good job of either beating blocks or slipping blocks and making tackles. We came into the game and wanted to try to establish the running game. Something we wanted to do and we just kept them involved. I think that’s important, but we didn’t get much out of it.”

Not at all. In the first half, the Giants ran the ball 16 times for 29 yards, an average of 1.8 yards per carry. Things got worse in the second half: eight rushing attempts for -3 yards. Add it all up and you get 26 yards rushing on 24 carries, a dismal average of 1.1 yards per carry.

The Giants moved away from the strong personnel packages in the second half, but then had given up the running game in favor of the pass. Jones threw 15 passes in the first half and 25 in the second, although the Giants were never really more than a touchdown and a two-point conversion away from tying the game.

Not so special teams

The Giants’ special teams seem to give us a reason to collectively hold our breath every week.

Last week, Greg Joseph missed a 48-yard field goal that, had he made it, would have iced the game for the Giants.

This week, the kickoff return unit featured Tyrone Tracy and Eric Gray as returners. Gray finished the game with two returns for 54 yards, including one where he went beyond the 30-yard line, and Tracy had two returns for 33 yards. But Tracy also shocked everyone when he fumbled the ball on the opening kickoff of the second half, which led to the coaches replacing him with Ihmir Smith-Marsette.

Luckily, tight end Chris Manhertz was there to make up the deficit. The Giants marched 77 yards in 11 plays before kicker Greg Joseph made his fourth field goal of the game, a 22-yarder that made it 14-12.

But is the performance of this unit too high to allow for stress-free gaming?

What happened?

Remember how Brian Daboll regularly made bold decisions in his first season as head coach that often worked to the team’s advantage?

Those days appear to be long gone, as Daboll no longer shows that drive as often as he did as a newly minted head coach.

The most recent case occurred in the first series of the third quarter. The Giants started this drive at their 20-yard line and marched to the Cowboys’ 10-yard line. But instead of throwing at least one shot into the end zone, the Giants kept their pass selection short.

The result was an incomplete pass to Wan’Dale Robinson on first down, followed by a run by Devin Singletary for two yards on second down, and then a short pass to Robinson on third down that picked up five of the eight yards needed.

In this situation, why not try a shot into the end zone on first down? If it falls incomplete, you still have second and third downs to move the ball.

Instead, Daboll and the offense played it safe, settling for the 22-yard field goal and not even thinking about trying it on fourth down.

“We wanted to get points,” said Daboll. “It was a close game, so we didn’t know what we would need at the end. But we wanted to do it.”

He got the points he wanted, but it wasn’t enough.

The last word

I realize the officials are only human, but how in the world did they miss the face mask that was actually worn by a Dallas defensive back but was used on Giants tight end Daniel Bellinger? There’s no telling whether the Giants would have gotten into the end zone on that drive, but that was about as obvious as a bad decision gets.

The sad thing is that while the Giants will probably send this play to the league for review and will likely receive confirmation that it was a botched call and an apology, that doesn’t change the way the game played out.