It’s not surprising to anyone at all, but the New York Giants are officially eliminated from contention from the playoffs with their loss on Sunday to the Green Bay Packers.
It was a fairly typical performance for the Giants with the offense moving slowly and the secondary allowing Aaron Rodgers to pass freely on it for four touchdowns, and quarterback Daniel Jones having three interceptions despite also having almost as many passing yards as Rodgers himself did. It just goes to show how important turnovers are for the result of the game and how much more competitive the game could have been if those raw yards were converted into actual touchdowns.
The important thing wasn’t the game itself, however, but the implications for what it means going forwards. The Giants are no longer in the hunt for the playoffs, and even though they were already out of the race in the minds of most, making it ‘official’ helps to shift the focus from this season to next year, and the changes that will inevitably be made.
The degree of those changes isn’t known just yet, and the Giants have chosen not to make changes to their staff mid season – while firing Pat Shurmur right now might provide a temporary spark to the locker room, it’s ultimately been proven to be too late for such a thing to matter. The team is out of the playoffs now, and they haven’t been considered contenders since the first weeks of the season.
Will John Mara make the decision that everyone is expecting and fire Shurmur and Dave Gettleman? Who would take over the head coaching position in such a scenario? How will the 2020 Draft be affected for the Giants? We’ll have to wait and see to find out the answers to those questions – but with the team out of the playoff hunt, they’ll likely be the most pressing thing on the mind of most fans during the final games of the year.