During NBC's Sunday Night Football, their numbers guy, the khaki-clad Steve Kornacki, mused over the odds for NFL teams to make the playoffs.
The Giants entered Sunday with a 16 percent chance to reach the playoffs. Then, the Washington Football Team lost a sloppy slugfest with the Seahawks, opening a hole for Big Blue to run through as their odds could have soared to 44 percent had they beat the Cleveland Browns on Sunday night.
But there was little chance of that happening. The G-Men seem to have forgotten what got them back in the playoff bubble to begin with - solid defense and safe decisions on offense. Instead, the Giants opened the game by driving to the Browns' five-yard-line (after Dion Lewis returned the kickoff nearly 50 yards), and, inexplicably, scattered like ants from the conventional field-goal formation on fourth down and hiked the ball directly to the punter with just three linemen blocking. When you gawk at a No. 9 throwing to a No. 65, bad things tend to follow, and that's what happened when punter Riley Dixon chucked a flailing duck to center Nick Gates, who was triple-teamed in the end zone.
The Browns swatted the ball away and the Giants blew their first chance - if not their best chance - to score a touchdown. Ironically, the only open receiver on the play was the kicker, Graham Gano, who strolled all alone across the goal line, but it was just the first foible of many in what became a 20-6 defeat to the Browns on national television.
According to NBC, the Giants’ loss kept their playoff odds at around 16 percent, but if you watched them struggle so mightily last night, along with a rare coaching dud by Joe Judge, you wonder if even that mark is too generous.
Sure, the Giants were dealt some pre-game blows. We guessed all week that backup QB Colt McCoy would be the starter, not the more nimble and gifted Daniel Jones…but they still won most improbably at Seattle with McCoy under center. They lost starting cornerback James Bradberry to the COVID-19 list too, though, and wildly talented but somewhat tormented TE Evan Engram flashed on the injured list with a balky knee (though he notched a modest four receptions for 46 yards).
Though the 10-4 Browns have a splashy record, these aren't exactly the Paul Brown - Jim Brown Cleveland Browns. Nor are they the Cardiac Kids led by Brian Sipe, or the AFC contenders captained by Bernie Kosar and coached by Marty Schottenheimer. Eight of this team's 10 wins - Washington, Dallas, Cincinnati (twice), Houston, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, and the Giants - came against sub-.500 clubs. In fact, the Browns are so historically bad they are fighting to break the longest playoff drought in the NFL (18 years), and one more win will give them 11 for the first time since their rebirth as the Browns in 1999. They have not won a single playoff game since someone named Belichick coached them, in 1994.
Those are the gridiron titans the 5-9 Giants just caved in to. In a local football world where everything seemed inverted - the 0-13 Jets rolled the 9-4 Rams, in Los Angeles, as a 17-point underdog - the Giants devolved from a scrappy bunch that jabbed you into exhaustion and defeat to a team that prefers to hand-deliver games to their foes. They got slaughtered by the Cardinals, at home the week before, and just to prove that wasn't an aberration, they waved the white flag, at home, to one of the more forlorn franchises in recent NFL history.
The Giants ran just 53 plays, held the ball for just 26 minutes, and bagged just 14 first downs. That's what happens when you average 3.5 yards per carry, on 21 rushes for 74 yards. The Browns scored on all three trips to the red zone, while the Giants went three times on three straight drives but notched just three points, a sequence including that funky fake field goal just three minutes into the game. The G-Men have scored 13 points over their last two games combined.
Big Blue has the somewhat good fortune of owning the tiebreaker over Washington (6-8), having defeated them twice this season, but the WFT has a much softer schedule the rest of the way, playing the Panthers and Eagles to end the season. Meanwhile, the Giants play the rugged Ravens, in Baltimore, next Sunday, before finishing the season, at home, on Jan 3, against the resurgent Dallas Cowboys. Washington ended the weekend with a near-50 percent chance of winning the NFC East – and if they beat Carolina and the Ravens beat the Giants next Sunday, that 50/50 chance becomes a 100 percent clinch.
If you just watched the Giants, well, so much for the 16 percent.
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
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