Giants put up a fight vs. Cowboys, but it's the same old result
Daniel Jones of the Giants throws a pass against the Dallas Cowboys at MetLife on Sunday. Credit: Mike Stobe
There was no head-scratching decision that left the Giants shorthanded Thursday night. No big gaffe or unsightly turnover that defined this game, and certainly no silly uniform combination to mock. The Giants seem to have outgrown those elements which led to — or at least exacerbated — their first two losses of the season.
Nor was this an embarrassingly lopsided game the way it was the last time these Cowboys came to MetLife Stadium to start the 2023 season.
There was no booing. There was no early abandonment of the seats by the home fans to cede the building for the visiting celebration. There was even a robust cheer when the final score of the Yankees game and a peek inside their champagne-soaked clubhouse in the Bronx was shown on the scoreboard in the third quarter, perhaps in hope that some of that pinstripe magic might make its way across the George Washington Bridge.
It did not.
The Giants lost to their most infuriating rival. 20-15, not because of anything dramatic or worth screaming about. They lost because they aren’t good enough to win these games yet. It was really that simple. No pitchforks, no calls for overhauling the organization.
Even with a strong game from Daniel Jones at quarterback (29-for-40, 281 yards), a 115-yard receiving effort from rookie sensation Malik Nabers, and a defense that held Dallas to no touchdowns in the second half, the Giants couldn’t get their long-awaited win in the series.
They kept it close and put up a fight but they clearly are not a team with the talent to compete against opponents such as Dallas. The Cowboys may not be a great team this season, but they are still better than the Giants and they demonstrated that on Thursday night.
“The result stinks,” Brian Daboll said. “But I thought there was improvement. . . . We played the game the way we needed to play it, we just missed out on a couple of things.”
After talking in the previous days about how this was a “new” team and a “new” phase of this feud, the Giants were saddled with a very old, very tired result. They came into this game with a staggering anomaly on their squad having no active players who had ever scored a touchdown for them against the Cowboys. They left the same way.
The Giants have clearly closed the gap a bit — or perhaps the Cowboys have regressed back toward them, it was hard to tell — but they are still one of the weaklings in their division. They’ve been there for a long time, too, losing seven straight now to the Cowboys and having lost to Washington in Week 2 to mire them at the bottom of these early standings.
Daboll’s message to the team afterward, according to several players, was that he was “disappointed but not discouraged.”
“I don’t see anybody hanging their head low,” linebacker Brian Burns said. “(Daboll) had a powerful message and I think everybody can relate to it.”
Said tight end Daniel Bellinger: “We’re getting better as a team. I think we’re a close team. I think we’ve learned form a lot of mistakes in the past and we’re growing in a lot of areas. We just need to execute the small details and finish these kinds of games.”
Not everyone was feeling so positive, however.
“I’m not giving us no petty wins," Dexter Lawrence said. "It’s whoever won on the scoreboard and that’s the game. I don’t give a damn about a petty win. This is football. We come out here to score points, to win, and stop them on defense. We didn’t do that and they beat us.”
The offense certainly had several opportunities to score, most notably the opening drive of the second half when they marched to the 3 but on fourth-and-goal kicked a short field goal that made it a 14-12 game. The Giants also had a fourth-quarter chance to score after holding Dallas to a 40-yard field goal with 6:56 left. On fourth-and-1 from their own 39 they converted on a 2-yard run by Devin Singletary, but on fourth-and-6 from their 45 Jones’ pass to Nabers failed. The receiver nearly made a spectacular catch along the sideline with his toes dragging inbounds after Jones had scrambled to his left, but the ball was not caught cleanly and correctly ruled incomplete.
Adding to the long-term concern was that Nabers suffered a concussion on the play.
When it was pointed out to Burns that the defense allowed 20 points and 293 yards, well within the range of expecting a win in today’s NFL, Burns said the defense should have limited the explosive plays like the 55-yard touchdown they gave up to CeeDee Lamb or forced a punt rather than a field goal on any of several possessions.
“It wasn’t enough to win today,” he said of the effort. “It’s good, but at the same time it’s not good enough to win.”
That last line inadvertently sums up these Giants.
This may just be who they are destined to be this season: Functional losers whose ceiling is capped by their own limitations.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.