Giants needed their defense to make a stop at Dallas; they couldn't
The Dallas Cowboys' Dak Prescott celebrates in front of the Giants' Kayvon Thibodeaux, left, and Tyler Nubin after running the ball for a first down in overtime of an NFL game Sunday in Arlington, Texas. Credit: AP/Jeffrey McWhorter
Kayvon Thibodeaux came tearing around the edge and put a big hit on Dak Prescott. The collision knocked the quarterback’s arm and the ball fluttered forward, where it was nearly caught in the air by Dexter Lawrence. The Cowboys picked the ball up believing it may have been a fumble — and it was originally ruled that way on the field — but replay assist quickly called it an incomplete pass.
That play happened at one of the most critical junctures of Sunday’s game, on first-and-10 from the Dallas 33 with 19 seconds left in regulation. It was sandwiched between two even more massive, memorable and more closely dissected ones: the 48-yard touchdown pass from Russell Wilson to Malik Nabers that gave the Giants a 37-34 advantage and the 18-yard pass to the Giants' 49 from Prescott to Jake Ferguson that essentially put the Cowboys in range to send the game to overtime with a long field goal.
Had Thibodeaux gotten there just a smidge earlier he might have had a sack that pushed the Cowboys further away from the range of their strong-legged kicker. Had Lawrence been able to pull the ball in — and to be fair that would have been an amazing catch for Nabers to make nevermind a defensive tackle — the game would have been over.
Neither of them made the play, though, and the Giants eventually wound up losing.
There were a number of such defensive opportunities to slam the door shut on the Cowboys as Sunday’s thriller of a game worked through its extended and dramatic climax:
• A botched snap by Prescott with his backup center on the field that the Giants could have pounced on.
• A pressure by Brian Burns and Abdul Carter on the next play that led to a third-down pass defensed by Dru Phillips but not a huge swing in possession or field position.
• And after Wilson’s interception with 2:00 left in overtime, there was a blitz by Bobby Okereke on which he seemed to have a clear path at Prescott but rather than sprint through the quarterback he came at him more cautiously, perhaps spooked by an earlier roughing-the-passer penalty he had incurred. Prescott hit that throw with Okereke in his face for a far-too-easy 27 yards to cross midfield and set up the game-winning kick.
Baseball isn’t the only sport in which teams need reliable closers. Football requires them, too, for instances when leads are precarious and the opponent must be shut down. It is then when a defense’s top talent, its most reliable and respected players, need to step forward, draw a line in the turf and seal a victory.
The Giants didn’t have anyone who could do that on Sunday. Despite all the captains and Pro Bowlers and first-rounders and big free agents and NFL Top 100 rankings they had on the field at the end of the game, the only truly impactful defensive play that sent the Cowboys backward in the final two minutes of regulation and 10 minutes of overtime was a 9-yard sack by practice squad call-up Elijah Garcia.
Who knows if or when they will again find themselves in such a position. They certainly haven’t been there a lot in recent years with the offense rarely playing well enough to get leads nevermind handing them over to the defense late in games. But if they want to win such contests someone — anyone! — needs to be able to take over and make just one play when it counts the most.
“We definitely need somebody to do it,” safety Jevon Holland said on Monday. “I mean, Russ and Leek, that was great. They stepped up. The defense had to step up again and finish the game. Your best guys make the plays when it counts the most.”
Or they don’t. And what happened on Sunday will continue to happen.
Brian Daboll is keenly aware of that. Not only was the coach's most recent game with the Giants now a victim of such circumstances, so too was his most recent game as offensive coordinator for the Bills. That was back in the playoffs following the 2021 season when Buffalo faced Kansas City. Like this game, it went back and forth through the fourth quarter and like this game Daboll’s offense scored a go-ahead touchdown very late in regulation. And like this game it didn’t hold and his team lost in overtime.
Being 13 seconds away from victory in that playoff classic will forever haunt the Bills and Daboll. The circumstances and stakes were a little different on Sunday — OK, a lot different — but being 25 seconds away this time stung pretty harshly, too.
“We had a number of opportunities throughout the game in every area to close that game out,” Daboll said on Monday. “There's a number of plays that came up throughout the game that if you have one different play there or here, it's going to make a difference in a game like that.”
By the way, that Kansas City team with that quarterback from January 2022 is coming to MetLife on Sunday to face the Giants.
In the Giants' locker room after the game, there were a lot of questions for the offense about what went right in their 37-point outburst and a lot of questions for the defense, the unit that had been overhauled and supposedly improved so much in the offseason, about what went wrong.
Lawrence blamed it on the penalties and the extra chances the Giants kept giving the Cowboys, but the Giants didn’t have any of those after Nabers’ touchdown (and Dallas, in fact, incurred three of them in overtime). The outside world blamed defensive coordinator Shane Bowen and his unaggressive calls that allowed Prescott to complete some fairly uncontested passes that set up the two fateful field goals, but even in that the Giants’ defensive backs, including Paulson Adebo, could have played tighter coverage. Holland on Monday talked about how fatigued the defense was having played 89 snaps in the game.
The most honest and accurate answer, though, came from Thibodeaux, who nearly had that sack or forced fumble or pressure on a pick that would have clinched the victory just prior to the Cowboys’ biggest play of the game.
“[Shoot], may the best players win,” he said.
Dallas’ best players did that. The Giants’ ones did not.
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.
