The Giants snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, gave it back, snatched it again…and ultimately, after 70 minutes of grueling football, walked out of Dallas 0-2 after a 40-37 loss in OT.
“This one hurts. These guys battled for 60-plus minutes,” head coach Brian Daboll said glumly after the loss.
The loss marred a game in which Russell Wilson threw for 450 yards and three touchdowns – including two with less than three minutes left – and Cam Skattebo scored his first NFL TD, and a game that featured 41 points scored and five lead changes in the fourth quarter alone before Brandon Aubrey’s 46-yard field goal at the gun sent it to OT.
“Every game’s different – last week it’s 14-6 in the fourth quarter with seven minutes left, this week it’s back and forth,” head coach Brian Daboll said of the loss. “We knew Aubrey had a long leg, tried to play tight coverage and they made some plays. They made one more play than we did.”
The two phrases that pretty much described Big Blue’s day were explosives and self-destruction – the former coming from a lot of Wilson’s 450 yards. The two touchdowns in the fourth quarter were 32 yards to Wan’Dale Robinson and 48 yards to Malik Nabers, and a 50-yard pass to Robinson in the first quarter set up the Giants’ first field goal of the game.
“Explosive plays help, obviously, and we hit a number of them in the pass game today,” Daboll said, “but collectively, we were a couple plays short. Tough game, back and forth, and I know our guys gave everything they had.”
And to that point were those 14 penalties, four of which were assessed on the first drive to rookie left tackle James Hudson III – including a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty after Robinson’s big catch that turned a first-and-goal at the 2 into first-and-10 at the 17, kept Big Blue out of the end zone, and saw Hudson benched in favor of Marvin Mbow the rest of the way.
“That’s too many, and he had a number of them, and I just thought let’s put Mbow in and settle it down a little bit,” Daboll said. “And then I told Carm and James (offensive line coaches Carmen Bricillo and James Ferentz) keep an eye on it. It’s not like he wants to go out there and commit these penalties – we had one where a guy slipped and he hit him in the head – but I thought at that point in time to put Mbow in.”
And so, despite over 500 yards of offense, scoring the third-most points in a game in the Daboll era, and a lead with 25 seconds left, Big Blue heads home for a Sunday nighter against Kansas City, who themselves lost to a division rival in the opener before Sunday afternoon’s Super Bowl rematch with Philly at Arrowhead.
“Just get ready to play next week. You’re gonna hurt 24 hours that’s for certain,” Daboll said. “The guys put a lot into it, coaches too, and left everything they had on the field, but we came up short. You wanna get the results, and we came up short. You let it sit for 24 hours and then you have to move on.”
BT had talked about the Giants needing to play well this week, even if they lost, or the whispers about Daboll’s future would get louder – did they do enough to quell it?