It might be a rocky start to the season for the New York Giants, but this team isn’t hanging their heads quite yet.
At 1-5, it is a foregone conclusion that the Giants face an uphill battle to make the postseason. Coming off making the playoffs two years ago, the hope was that last year’s fall to just three wins was a blip in the radar and that the Giants could bounce back quickly and be competitive.
Turns out that getting younger and rebuilding was perhaps a bigger undertaking than most were willing to concede. And here currently sits the Giants, a team that still has a ways to go in the retooling of its roster. Progress has been made but it won’t be fast enough to make them a playoff team this year.
[Giants Post Game Live Monday At 11:30 PM On MSG & MSG GO.]
In the long run, this isn’t a bad thing. Last year’s roster was constructed with quick fixes in mind in an effort to get a return trip to the playoffs. When the band-aid fell off in 2017, the Giants were exposed as being a team that lacked depth and desperately needed to shed some under-performing veterans to gain roster flexibility. Painful decisions were made this off-season when it came to reshaping the roster and while the team is younger and faster and perhaps even deeper this year, work remains to get these Giants back into the mix to challenge for the NFC East and the playoffs.
Which leaves the Giants here and now perhaps a bit underwhelming but still fighting.
“You learn from the past. You learn your lessons from the past,” safety Landon Collins said this week. “Everybody says, ‘The past is the past.’ You can only learn lessons from it. We put it behind us, and we’re moving towards the future. We got Atlanta this week, so we’ve got to work on them. What happened in the past is just the past. You can’t really take but lessons from it.”
In their Week 7 opponent, the Giants face an Atlanta Falcons team that is going through their own struggles. More was expected of this team than their current 2-4 record suggests.
The Falcons were supposed to take a step forward this year, after last season’s 10-6 record and a trip to the playoffs. They came into last week with two straight losses but rebounded with a 34-29 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
They are a team that is like the Giants and hoping to turn things around starting on Monday night after a tough start to the season.
The good news for the Giants is that Atlanta has struggled with their run defense this year, especially notable with running back Saquon Barkley coming off a big game in Week 6. The Giants now can’t be caught looking ahead or worrying that their next loss likely knocks them out of playoff contention.
Instead, they need to focus on what lies ahead on Monday night in Atlanta and have some selective amnesia when it comes to the first six games of the season.
“I don’t think it’s hard to forget about the things in the past, especially with such a long season and it’s a new team every week,” Barkley said.
“Obviously you’re well aware of what happened in the past, but you definitely have to put that in the past because you’re not going to grow if you reflect on the bad things that happened in the past. So, we definitely got to continue to put that in the past, continue to grow as a team and focus on the future and focus on the rest of the season and go game by game and right now that focus is on the Falcons.”
[Giants Post Game Live Monday At 11:30 PM On MSG & MSG GO.]