This Giants loss to the Broncos was their most painful
Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart is tackled during the first half of an NFL game against the Denver Broncos in Denver on Sunday. Credit: AP/David Zalubowski
DENVER
Dexter Lawrence has been part of some very horrendous losses during his tenure with the Giants. Heck, just last month, they dropped a game in Dallas in which they had taken the lead with 25 seconds remaining.
If there were a statistical method to tally the number of unique ways in which a team can drop a contest, the Giants undoubtedly would lead the league during the past decade.
But this one? This 33-32 meltdown?
“This one hurts more,” Lawrence said. “This one hurts.”
Andrew Thomas had the same feeling. Although he was reluctant to start ranking disappointments, he simply said: “This one hurts a lot.”
It wasn’t just the way it all unfolded: Allowing leads of 19-0 and 26-8 to evaporate, giving up 33 points in the fourth quarter after holding the Broncos to none through the first three, and taking a two-point lead on a 65-yard touchdown drive capped by Jaxson Dart’s 1-yard run with 37 seconds left — only to miss the extra point (for the second time in the game) and allow the winning field goal as time expired.
What stung even more was what was at stake. For the first time in a while, the Giants had the chance to pull themselves out of their malaise, to change their narrative. Had they held on to win this game, everything would have been different.
They would have won three of their last four games, would have been inching into the race in the NFC East. They could have been staring at the possibility of being back to .500 if they could figure out how to beat the Eagles next week.
Trade deadline moves and aggressive personnel decisions and daydreams about a playoff push were there for the taking.
Instead, the Giants are back to being just another two-win team that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Ten days after a statement win over the Eagles on Thursday night, they turned in a loss that made an entirely different statement about them.
Brian Daboll said he didn’t say much to the team afterward. “Not a lot of talking to be done when you lose a game like that,” he said.
Wan’Dale Robinson described the level of shock in the postgame locker room as “pretty high.”
The comparisons to Dallas are inevitable, but this was a far different game. That loss to the Cowboys was a back-and-forth shootout. In this one, the Giants took a huge lead and blew it. They were up by 18 points in the final six minutes and lost, making it the first time in the last 1,602 NFL games that happened.
“That shouldn’t happen in an NFL game,” Robinson said.
But it also was different because these Giants were supposed to be in a different place than they were in Week 2. Their bravado and cockiness were palpable, but their competence was, too.
“We just have to finish,” said second-year cornerback Dru Phillips, who was in coverage on the 29-yard completion to Marvin Mims that began the game-winning drive. “It sucks to lose these types of games.”
The Broncos’ first touchdown was the kind of unorthodox play that usually costs the Giants. Bo Nix tried to get a pass to Courtland Sutton in the end zone that was broken up by Phillips, but the ball bounced in the air and was caught by Troy Franklin.
But soon after that, there was a similar play on which Dart tried to hit Robinson, the ball ricocheted off him into the arms of Theo Johnson, and the tight end took it for a 41-yard touchdown.
“A lot of times those bounces don’t go our way,” Robinson said. “I’m glad one of them did go our way today. But it wasn’t enough.”
The Giants faced a lot of questions regarding their play-calling in the fourth quarter. Daboll said the Giants were in man defense down the stretch, not the soft coverage they were in against the Cowboys, but it didn’t matter — especially with starters Paulson Adebo and Jevon Holland sidelined by injuries for most of the second half.
Of course it was Deontae Banks, who had lost his starting role and his playing time before he had to return to service in place of Paulson, who was covering Sutton on the 23-yard gain that set up the spike that preceded the winning kick.
There also was some thought that the Giants’ offensive play-calling had gone conservative and a little predictable while trying to nurse their lead to the finish line. Obviously, that wasn’t the case on the go-ahead drive in the final minute, but before that, there were some stalled drives and a killer interception thrown by Dart that gave the Broncos momentum.
Strategies, though, were nothing compared to the way the execution shriveled up. In a game in which there were so many big, memorable plays by the defense, when it mattered the most, they couldn’t make another.
“We’ve done it multiple times,” defensive tackle Rakeem Nunez-Roches said. “We’ve been in situations where we could have a team suffocated and somehow we gave them life, we had a turnover, we had a penalty, and then there goes the change and we never recover from that . . . We have to get that out of our DNA.”
This was the game that could have done just that. Should have done just that.
Instead, it just gets tossed onto the pile of other heartbreaking and miserable defeats the Giants have collected.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
