Giants need to start scoring some more points
Darius Slayton of the Giants can't come up with a catch during the fourth quarter against Amani Oruwariye of the Dallas Cowboys at MetLife Stadium on Thursday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Where do the Giants go from here?
The obvious answer: To Seattle. And playing the Seahawks on Sunday won’t be easy.
Before their 42-29 loss to the Lions on Monday night, the Seahawks (3-1) had the second-best defense in yards allowed, behind only the Steelers. Seattle also was allowing an NFL-low 132.3 passing yards per game.
The rest of the numbers aren’t pretty, either. The Giants have scored an NFC-low 60 points in four games.
Among offensive lines, the Giants rank 15th in pass-blocking. That is progress from previous years.
But this is an important bottom line: The Giants have failed to score a touchdown in two games this season (both losses, both at home) and are averaging 15.0 points per game, which is slightly less than last year’s average of 15.6.
Those numbers almost seem as if they were from the NFL’s olden days. Entering Monday, only New England and Miami had scored fewer points than the Giants this season. New Orleans, Buffalo and Washington are all scoring more than double the Giants’ average.
Coming off their mini-bye, Giants players had time to watch football over the weekend. Offensive tackle Jermaine Eluemunor said he spent time wondering “how to figure out what you can do better as a team and as a person and as a player and go from there.”
He added: “You can watch other teams and try to pick up little things that they’re doing, [but] their team is completely different to how our team is built. No team in the NFL is built like the Giants. No team is built like the [Detroit] Lions, the Seattle Seahawks. They’re all built differently to fulfill the needs that they want and obviously need and how they want to play in their style of playing. Things like that.”
For several reasons, Eluemunor said he believes the Giants are on the cusp of scoring more points.
“If you watch our games, we’ve moved the ball in every single game,” he said. “Obviously, in the opener against the Vikings, we could have moved it a little bit better, but we were still moving the ball in that game. If you watch the Vikings now, a lot of teams struggle against that defense. I feel like we played a pretty good game against them, just weren’t clean enough and didn’t execute enough.
“But then you watch the other three games, we’ve moved the ball up and down the field on all three of those teams and all three of those teams have really good defenses. So I think that we’re really close and I think that we’ll see that this week.”
The three other teams Eluemunor referenced were the Commanders, Browns and Cowboys.
Darius Slayton was the other player made available to the media on Monday. He, too, voiced optimism about the offense.
“I think we’ve done a pretty consistent job of moving the ball over the past three weeks, specifically,” Slayton said. “I think outside of Game 1, we’ve moved the ball in the last three games. We’ve moved the ball really well. We’ve gotten into scoring position fairly consistently.”
The challenge, of course, is to score touchdowns.
“We just haven’t been able to finish in the red zone like we wanted to, obviously, this last game [against Dallas], specifically,” Slayton said. “But I think on offense, we’ve done a good job establishing the run game at times. In the Washington game, we ran it really well. We ran it pretty well against Cleveland. Not as great against Dallas, but most of that was self-inflicted wounds.
“I think we’ve also done a pretty good job on offense of being efficient. I think we’ve wanted to maybe hit some of the more explosive, bigger plays. We’ve hit a couple of them, obviously could have hit more, but we’ve done a good job of being efficient, moving the chains and sustaining drives.”
The challenge for these Giants is to score more points. Until that happens, the results likely won’t change.
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
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