Will the New York Giants finish the year with a better record than they had in 2018? The team has, believe it or not, improved over the past couple of years. After the disaster of a 3-13 season which resulted in the team picking number two overall in the draft and being able to acquire their current best player, Saquon Barkley, they were able to finish with five wins in 2018. However, five wins isn’t exactly anything to celebrate, even if the team did improve, and a franchise such as the Giants has much larger expectations on its shoulders.
Similarly, six wins wouldn’t be much of an improvement even if it technically would give the team more success than they had last year. Improvement is the goal but the team would have to improve much more than that to be able to meet the expectations set by their fans and likely by the team ownership itself, with patience dwindling during this string of bad seasons.
According to Sports Illustrated, though, six wins is where the New York Giants are going to end up this season – not good enough to please anyone and not bad enough to get a high enough draft pick to expect a quicker turnaround. In other words, the team is projected to be in maybe the worst spot a team can be in.
Another team that is almost impossible to evaluate right now. When does Daniel Jones take over as the starting quarterback? When tracking their schedule, I tried to envision a bye-week changeover, though if Pat Shurmur decides to start a rookie quarterback for the first time on the road in late November against the Bears, he may be crazier than I thought.
However, if there’s one thing to take comfort in, it’s that the article assumes that Daniel Jones is going to start in 2019 – This seems unlikely unless events force the Giants to change their stance on Eli Manning being the starter, which isn’t impossible but wouldn’t happen lightly after repeated statements from players and coaching staff members alike that indicate that Manning is the man for now.
Regardless of what you think of Eli Manning or of Daniel Jones, it’s in the best interest of the Giants for now to not have a quarterback battle this season and risk ruining the player that they may end up depending on during the next years by throwing him into things too early.
One can hope that this season, Manning’s play is good enough that the team doesn’t have to consider the scenario that the article speaks of, which would place Jones into the lineup mid season.