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It’s taken eight years and four years, but the New York Giants are finally paying the karma bill for their two Super Bowls.
New York’s runs to the title at the end of the 2007 and 2011 seasons are perhaps the two most improbable championships since the team they beat in those Super Bowls, the Patriots, overcame the Rams in 2002.
The Giants deserved their titles – they beat quality opposition and continuously found themselves making big plays while their opponents faltered. Composure is a skill, the ultimate trump card in the playoffs, and the ’07 and ’11 Giants had it in spades.
New York also got lucky. All champions ride their luck to some extent, but the Giants’ luck wasn’t just one or two plays, it was a string of them, one after the other; an unfortunate series of events for the opposition that must have made them feel like they weren’t just battling the team from America’s biggest city, but also the entire cosmos.
From the David Tyree catch and Asante Samuel’s dropped interception, to the Hakeem Nicks Hail Mary and Ahmad Bradshaw’s fumble brought back by ‘forward progress’ (the two sweetest words in any Giants fan’s vocabulary), the G-Men spent all their luck tickets and got their money’s worth.
You can think of luck as entirely random, a universally replenishable resource, or you can think of it as a dipstick, something that runs out and needs to be refilled. Sport has a habit of making it the latter, and the Giants have been forced to deal with a bone-dry dipstick for the past four seasons.
Big Blue are 28-34 since winning their last Super Bowl. In the 2013 and 2014 seasons they weren’t good enough to bring luck into the equation, but this year is a different story.
It’s hard to think that the Giants aren’t one of the six best teams in the NFC. They’re sixth in the conference by DVOA, ELO rating and point differential, the only team in the NFC East with a positive scoring margin. The two favourites for the Super Bowl, New England and Carolina, combined to beat New York by a total of four points, both winning with field goals at the buzzer.
The reason the Giants are sitting at 6-8, with just an eight per cent chance of making the playoffs per FiveThirtyEight, is simple: bad luck, which has often been self-inflicted.
New York is a stunning 1-7 in games decided by less than a touchdown – a record so terrible that it’s sort of impressive. The one in that stat is the lone game they stole this year, a 30-27 Week 5 triumph over San Francisco, where Eli Manning put on his Tom Brady Super Bowl XLIX costume and marched down the field with Shane Vereen as his go-to weapon.
The Giants have left so many wins on the table this year that the table has collapsed. This season has been defined by New York losing games where if one play had gone differently – not just differently, but the way it should have gone – they would have won.
The Week 1 loss to Dallas remains the most indefensible – all New York had to do was not stop the clock at the goal-line in the final moments and victory was theirs. In Week 10, if Landon Collins catches a Brady pass that a seven-year-old with a baseball mitt could have caught, it was coming so slowly, the Giants beat the Patriots and keep the curse of Tyree alive.
The Giants blew ten-point fourth-quarter leads to the Falcons and Jets – walked into their graves against Atlanta by deciding to single cover Julio Jones, and losing in overtime to the Jets after a missed field goal by Josh Brown.
New York were up seven with 37 seconds to go in New Orleans and somehow contrived to lose that game in regulation without turning the ball over or giving up an onside kick, which seems almost impossible.
They should have beaten Dallas and New England – the games were such that it still feels jarring to see that they weren’t counted as a ‘win’ in the standings – and it’s inconceivable, but of course true, that they didn’t win at least one of the Falcons, Jets or Saints games. They really should be 9-5 or 8-6, but they’re not, and as much as they can rightly look to the fault in their stars, they should also just look at what’s happening on the ground in New Jersey.
Tom Coughlin’s clock management this year has made Andy Reid look like the LeBron James of managing end-game situations. It’s fitting that New York’s season effectively ended over the weekend as Coughlin refused to use any of his three timeouts to stop the clock, even when it became clear that the Panthers were going to score.
You can’t give up 52 points to the woeful Saints, spot Kirk Cousins a 20-0 lead, or allow Ryan Fitzpatrick to mount two score fourth-quarter comebacks and expect to be a playoff team. Luck can excuse many things, but a 6-8 record is pushing it, even when seven of those eight losses could have been reversed with a single throw.
The mystique of the ’07 and ’11 Giants is such that they would still be feared if they somehow made it into the playoffs this year (which will require them to win out against Minnesota and Philadelphia, Philadelphia to beat Washington next week, and Washington to lose to Dallas in week 17; not impossible, but certainly implausible). But the fact is this team just isn’t that good.
Their two title teams were built on dominant defensive lines, but this Giants team has the 31st ranked pass rush in the league. The ’07 team relied on a powerful ground game, while the ’11 Giants prospered through the air. The rushing attack has been blunted this year, ranking 27th per DVOA, and the passing game, while dangerous, is dependent on Odell Beckham Jr (whose mind was lost somewhere between New York and East Rutherford), and ranks a middling 16th in the league.
There are a lot of things this team does poorly and not a whole heap that they do well, aside from the league’s second ranked special teams.
This will likely be the fourth lost season in a row since the last Super Bowl. The future isn’t as dark for New York as it is for bare-bones teams like San Diego and San Francisco, but it’s not especially bright, falling into a dim purgatory with other cold weather, mid-tier teams with veteran quarterbacks like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia.
There is cause for the hope. New York has spent significant draft capital on the offensive line and they’ve reaped dividends this year with the league’s eighth rated pass protection unit.
After some questions over previous years, Eli Manning has silenced the doubters and is having the best season of his career at 34. With a stellar 32-11 touchdown-interception split and a 96.1 passer rating, Manning – despite the inevitable ‘oh no, Eli’ moments every now and then – has mastered Ben McAdoo’s offence, now a veteran statue of composure antithetical to the erratic inconsistency of his youth.
Manning’s rebirth has unsurprisingly coincided with the arrival of Beckham. OBJ might be the most exciting player in the league, and even among the frustrating chaos of Coughlin’s obsession with irrationality and a defence that can’t stop anything, Beckham alone has made the Giants must-see TV for the past two seasons. His behaviour against Carolina was an inexcusable black mark against himself and the season, but by all accounts he’s generally an outstanding character.
The Giants have real holes with a defence that has to be almost rebuilt from scratch, and a dearth of offensive talent outside of Manning and Beckham. But in Eli they have the game’s most important position filled, and in Beckham they have the sport’s most vital aspect covered – excitement.
Next season – and perhaps, still, this season – they’ll have to refill their good fortune dipstick, and stop smashing it against the pavement themselves. In the meantime, Giants fans can content themselves with what they spent their luck on in the first place, knowing that they’re the only team in the league over the past eight years that can raise their hand to the sky and have the sun reflect off two rings.