For 50-plus minutes, the Giants' defense stifled the Rams' nuclear offense, which had just dropped 32 points on the Bills in Buffalo. The Rams finally scored on a dart to Cooper Kupp, aided by some sorry tackling, to jump up 17-9, but the G-Men got the ball back for one final drive, and began to march.
With 58 seconds left in the game, and the ball deep in Rams territory, Daniel Jones heaved a wayward pass toward the right sideline. Rams DB Darius Williams, reading Jones' eyes like the back page of the Post, jumped the route and picked off the pass at the five yard line. It sealed the game, another loss for the Giants (0-4), and leads to more questions about Jones, the artist formerly known as Danny Dimes.
As Boomer Esiason noted Monday morning, Jones could have run for the first down, and thus get the Giants exponentially closer to scoring. Instead, he threw a pick, and the Giants did not score a single touchdown, which is laughable in today's NFL.
Not that Rams QB Jared Goff played like Joe Montana, but he was substantially better than Jones, despite throwing for just 10 more yards than Big Blue's QB. Goff completed 78 percent of his passes, compared to just 63 percent for Jones, and tossed one TD pass and zero picks, the reverse of Jones. Goff also finished with a 103.1 passer rating to Jones’ 65.7.
Goff has Kupp and Robert Woods and Tyler Higbee and the wunderkind coach, but that doesn’t fully explain the entire disparity in play, in stats, or Jones' regression since he was labeled a savior just last year. Jones has thrown the third-most interceptions (only Kirk Cousins and Carson Wentz have more) and fumbled again, even if the Rams didn't recover it. Jones doesn't have all his weapons, having lost all-World tailback Saquon Barkley and dependable wideout Sterling Shepard, but when your defense holds a team as talented as the Rams to 10 points for 53 minutes, you need to at least score more.
Head coach Joe Judge waxed romantic about the team's toughness and improvement. But praise can't swim against a winless current, and if toughness is the team mantra, it's curious that Boomer also noticed some infamous alligator arms from Giants wideout Golden Tate, who also may have hit the deck a few times rather than get drilled by Rams defenders. Of course, Tate and the G-Men turn into Mike Tyson after the game, ready to fight when it doesn't count.
We're also noticing some mushrooming optimism over some of Jones' youthful peers. Josh Allen is morphing into a monster in Buffalo, and an MVP candidate; Lamar Jackson is still making defenses look silly; Patrick Mahomes has a Secretariat-like lead on his contemporaries; and two rookies, Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert, are showing endlessly more promise than Jones is – and you can't complain that the Bengals have blessed Burrow with Bill Walsh weapons, while Herbert, who had to fill some epic shoes when Philip Rivers left the Chargers, is looking like the NFL Rookie of the Year (yours truly actually called that, by the way).
It just feels foolish to apologize twice for opposing positions on the same topic. Many of us blasted Dave Gettleman when the Giants drafted Jones, a decent football player at a basketball school, with the sixth overall pick in the NFL Draft. Then Jones had this two-game epiphany, starting with a win at Tampa Bay after relieving Eli Manning at halftime. The team leaped from 0-2 to 2-2 in a week, and Jones became the most popular athlete in Gotham, with his fresh new handle of Danny Dimes.
So, some of us moonwalked from our initial disgust with Gettleman and praised his prescience; clearly, he saw something in Jones that eluded the rest of us? Well, whatever it was, it didn't last long, and Jones has gone from boy wonder to fans wondering if he's even a starting NFL signal-caller, much less a franchise player.
So Jones and Judge and the Giants brass can find moral victories in yet another loss. But as the patron saint of the Meadowlands, Bill Parcells, famously said, ‘you are what your record says you are’ – which means that the Giants are winless, perhaps hopeless, and maybe not even better than the Jets, a team that has devolved pro football back into the single-wing era of leather helmets and an allergy to passing and scoring.
And, in four short weeks, we went from wondering how much the Giants have improved from their 4-12 eyesore last season to where Daniel Jones stands, or if he may lose his job to someone not even in the NFL - Trevor Lawrence.
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
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