The Arizona Cardinals aren’t the best team in the league, having come into their matchup with the New York Giants as the worst ranked team in their division, but on Sunday they managed to dominate in the first half against the Giants regardless, holding on long enough to secure a win by about a touchdown.
The result might spell the end of the Giants’ hopes to be competitive this season, as the team falls to a record of 2-5 going into their next game with the Lions. Sitting three games behind just .500, it looks more and more unlikely that the Giants will be able to bounce back enough to even get into the conversation for making the Wild Card round of the playoffs this year.
It wouldn’t be the first season in recent memory where the team is ruled out of contention far before the closing weeks of the season are approaching – last year, the team was already almost definitively out of the race, and that looks like the case here.
After all, the team’s pass blocking was in shambles, the Cardinals were able to run against the Giants at will, and the coaching staff currently have few explanations except for the thing that’s already a well known fact: that the Giants have to get better.
“I think they had a couple of explosive runs against us. There were a lot of runs that we defended well. We’ll go back and look at the reason why the couple of them split on us. We need to do a better job all over— offense, defense, special teams did a good job blocking. But, we have to make our field goals, too. We just have to do a better job all the way around,” head coach Pat Shurmur said after the loss.
But saying that the team needs to get better is hardly enough of a response to actually turn the team around at a time like this.
“We have to get better in all areas. That’s where I view it. It starts by getting ready to play Detroit,” Shurmur repeated when asked about the team’s situation now that they’re sitting at 2-5.
The Giants may just find the improvement that they’re looking for, but for now, with little improvement in the performances between weeks and with a coaching staff that can barely give definitive answers about what went wrong, that improvement might be beyond the scope of the season.
While there’s still a lot of football left to be played this year, if this one game is anything to go on, it may not be the most fun to watch for fans of the Giants.