The New York Giants can’t wait forever to improve. On one hand, you could argue that the season is relatively new and that there’s still plenty of time to turn things around. On the other hand, there’s still a finite number of weeks and a limited amount of time for that potential turnaround to happen. After four games, the Giants have a 1-3 record and scored less than 20 points in their outing against the New Orleans Saints.
It will take them two wins at this point just to get back to a .500 winning percentage, and while it’s true that it’s early in the season, falling behind like this at the start isn’t the way to make it into the playoffs. Especially when you can’t expect to win the division and make it in automatically.
“We’ve just got to play our way back into it. That’s the world that we live in as coaches and players. We have all the things we need to do better,” said head coach Pat Shurmur, mentioning that the Giants are one game back. No team in the NFC East has more than two wins at this point, but that doesn’t mean anything if the Giants aren’t good enough to capitalize on it.
The rest of the division won’t be like this for the entire season, and if the Giants don’t catch up before other teams start racking up wins, they’ll find themselves out of the race for the playoffs completely. There’s still time to improve, but those improvements can’t take forever to happen. With each loss, the margin for error grows even smaller. A team can’t afford to lose later on, if they’ve already piled up the losses in the early season.
And through the first four weeks, the Giants have three of them. It’s true that things aren’t over, as Shurmur stated earlier in the season, but that won’t be true for too much longer if the same results continue.
Let’s hope for real changes. Things like giving Saquon Barkley the ball more, and trying different routes with Odell Beckham Jr. to finally allow him to score a touchdown. Because right now, the belief that the Giants can keep doing what they’re doing and play their way back into winning the division is optimistic but unrealistic at best.
The needed improvements need to happen as soon as the next game, because if the team starts 1-4, three games under .500, the idea of some turnaround to reach the playoffs will be nothing more than a fantasy. Hot streaks are hard to maintain, and it’s time to stop imagining that the Giants will turn the corner, only lose a few more times this season, and stumble into the playoffs with a record like 10-6 or 9-7.