It's who the giants are

I do not want to hear a single reader complaining about having to watch giants in prime time. Buddy, I live here; I have to watch them each the week. And yes, based on this first-hand knowledge, they are absolutely bad.

The Cowboys easily handled the Giants in a 20-13 match that was spiritually an explosion. New York needed the fourth quarter to record their first touchdown pass of the season, and that's not an anomaly. The offensive line is Swiss cheese (and now, Jon Halapio being embarked last night, probably without his starting center for the year), and Eli Manning is not mobile enough or armed enough to do anything else. This, despite all the players who can do big things with the ball in their hands.

Two score elements that seem particularly revealing:

1. We all agree that Odell Beckham Jr. is one of the best receivers of football, is not it? And that it should be targeted as often as it is realistic? Between an unfinished with 6:01 remaining in the first quarter and an unfinished with 9:18 remaining in the third quarter, Manning has targeted Beckham only once. Once! (This was also incomplete.)

If you want to credit the Cowboys D-backs for smothering their double and triple cover, well, you'd be wrong: Dallas was playing two safes, a relatively cautious look intended to cut the big games for which Beckham is known . . Yet the Giants did not even understand it for the average game. "They did not really play heroically in the cover," said head coach Pat Shurmur.

2. Saquon Barkley set the franchise record for the Giants and tied an NFL record, for most receptions by a rookie, with 14. That's good! Barkley, incredibly, only gained 80 yards in total on those 14 shots. It's bad. Historically bad, 5.7-YPC bad. No NFL player has ever caught 14 balls and accumulated less than 90 yards.

Barkley is mainly used as a safety valve for Manning when he is under pressure, which has often been the case: he was fired six times last night. It's nice to have, but that's not why the Giants fished Barkley, and it's not the dominant part of the Giants attack. It certainly was not the plan: "That kind of what just happened," said Barkley about his high-volume, low-efficiency night.

Here is a quote as pink as possible for all this:

"When you have new players, a new system, a new coach, it sometimes takes a little time, especially for your first game on the road," said Eli Manning. "It may take a bit of time to get your pace and get things done, so we just have to keep working and make sure everyone can understand coaches to do better and do things differently to put us in a better position. "

The offensive line East All new, except for Ereck Flowers, who was moved right to try to hide his difficulties in passing protection. But Manning is not new. Remember that the Giants' QB was 37 years old, and not good, and was not going to get better, and the Giants had a repechage position once in a generation, and did absolutely nothing to resolve the problem? (Except, I guess, write him a new checkdown receiver.) What exactly did they think was going to happen this year? They may have been the first 3-13 team to decide that they should be in win-win mode, a disconcerting decision, regardless of Barkley's talent.

The Giants have not scored 30 points in a game since the last Sunday of the 2015 season, Tom Coughlin's last game as a coach. Only one other team in the league has failed to score 30 points since: the Browns. The Browns, who have won just one game during this period, are the offensive counterparts of the Giants. Does this look like the company guarded by a team that should look for complementary offensive weapons instead of starting from scratch? It's not. However, Shurmur and General Manager Dave Gettleman treated the off-season as if the team had had another start before Eli Manning's window closed. They are perhaps the only ones in the world not to accept that the window of the Giants has not yet been opened.