Why Your Team Sucks 2018: New York Giants

Some people are fans of the New York Giants. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Giants. This 2018 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New York Giants. Your 2017 record: 3-13. Another team went 0-16 in the NFL last season, and yet these Giants somehow had the more disastrous season. It was astonishing. Thrilling, really. Here we have the most overly mannered of NFL franchises. A team that’s run like a Park Avenue co-op board. A team would play in formal morning suits if the uniform code allowed for it. The Giants are so thirsty to appear dignified that it is truly, deeply awesome to watch them spend an entire season stepping on rakes. They got shut out by a team starting Drew Stanton. They let the Rams hang 51 on them at home. You see this play? This play resulted in a Rams touchdown. Their offense became a sinkhole. Their star wideout got hurt and the team made virtually no effort to shield him from his critics. Their best defensive player openly called Eli Apple a cancer. They lost to Detroit after getting flagged for a delay of game on 4th and goal from the 2 line. The coach threw Eli Manning under the bus after that loss and then benched him later in the season without warning (more on that in a moment), and for Geno Smith of all people. They suspended Apple for the final game, causing him to react thusly:   I like reading that quote in Phil Leotardo’s voice. Really Jersey-fies the whole situation by a good 80 percent. The only fun thing that happened for this team last year was when Odell peed in the end zone. I’m gonna confess here that I’ll miss the Ben McAdoo Giants. I’ll miss the way McAdoo found a way to say the exact wrong thing at virtually every press conference. I’ll miss him looking, at all times, like an auto mechanic you cannot trust. I’ll miss him using one formation for an entire season. I’ll miss him reliably calling a fade route to the ninth-string tight end three times in a row from the opponent’s one-yard line. I’ll miss his hair! Look at that goddamn hair. God, it was majestic. I’m already bereft that this man and his Seventh Grade Date Night hair won’t be prowling the sidelines in 2018. For an all-too-brief moment, the Giants were every bit as fucking terrible and fraudulent as their fans routinely accuse of them of being, and the world was a purer place for it. But he’s gone now, along with GM Jerry Reese. As a corrective to their cinematic nimcompoopery, the Giants did the most Giants thing possible and brought in former Panthers GM Dave Gettleman, whose favorite thing to do on Earth is cut players who are making too much money. Gettleman had to take a leave from the team this spring to get treatment for lymphoma, but not before pledging to reestablish New York’s claim to being the singularly dullest, most outdated team in football. He also thinks math is nerd shit. “I think it’s someone who had decided to get into the analytics of it and went through whatever . . . At the end of the day, a great player is a great player.” Shit yeah. Those are the New York Giants I know and hate. I’d rather shop for paint than watch this fucking team. Your coach: Pat Shurmur. Hello! Vikings fan here. Let me tell you about Pat Shurmur. First off, he’s relaxed. Very relaxed. Some people think he might be dead! Now, it’s very fine and good to be such a relaxed coach when you’re working UNDER a fiery, red ass of a head coach like, say, Mike Zimmer. But when you decide to put such a saturnine coach actively in charge of things, it’s probably unwise. Do you know how hard it is to be the most forgettable head coach in Cleveland Browns history? I know the record says Shurmur went 9-23 with the Browns but I assure you that those two years never happened. Those two years are a void upon the historic record, lost inside a parallel dimension of spacetime that will never reopen. To have Pat Shurmur as your head coach is to ask for an induced football coma. Also, the new offensive coordinator is Mike Shula. Tell me you aren’t ROCK HARD. Finally, the Giants will have the 19th century’s most sophisticated offense. The rest of league is gonna absolutely shudder at New York’s dazzling array of dives, and isos, and iso dives! WHOA HEY SLOW THIS HORSE CARRIAGE DOWN, MISTER SHULA! You go any faster and we might go time traveling right into the Age of Talkies! Your quarterback: He lives!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA [deep breath] AHHHHHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA You know, you could easily argue that the one thing Ben McAdoo did right in his tenure with the Giants was to bench Eli Manning and attempt, with remarkable futility, to end his reign of terror. The move backfired both because of the timing and because Geno Smith is ass, but the idea itself wasn’t a bad one. In fact, it was downright necessary. Obviously, you know what happened next: the football public cried out in anger, demanded justice for poor idiot Eli, and McAdoo saw his career come to abrupt end. And not only was Eli reinstated as the starter, but the Giants have now gone ahead and, in a wild overcorrection, frantically rebuilt the roster AROUND HIM, as if last season never happened. When Old Yeller is dying, you take him out behind the shed, man! You don’t prop his lifeless corpse up on the couch and tell the kids it’s fine! And yet, that’s precisely what the Giants are doing. Do you know how fucking bad Eli was last season? Jay Cutler had a better passer rating. DeShone Kizer, Tom Savage, and David Fales all had more yards per attempt. He’s finished. If his name was Eli Fartsock, his career would have been over five years ago. Instead, he’s more entrenched than he’s ever been. His backup is Davis Webb. The only QB the Giants drafted to challenge Eli was fourth rounder Kyle Lauletta, who cannot possibly be a real person. All it took was one unceremonious benching for Eli to somehow consolidate power all across this dopey organization. The fact that Tom Coughlin dragged Blake Bortles to the AFC title game will only make the Mara family’s prolonged boner for continuity worse. Eli is never leaving. He is hayseed Rasputin. Also, he’s a fucking criminal! Eli may have quietly settled the lawsuit accusing him of defrauding memorabilia dealers (I know there’s no better group of people on Earth to defraud, but still), but the ugly details are still out there in plain sight. The emails depict Manning as sending a message to Giants equipment manager Joe Skiba, asking him to hand over “two helmets that can pass as game-used.” Was Manning suspended for this? Of course he wasn’t. Roger Goodell would probably feign deafness if you ever asked him about it. The Giants, who were co-defendants in that case, never came close to issuing any sort of public criticism of their QB over it. Meanwhile, Odell takes a shit and Mister Mara sends out a 90-page memo about it. What’s new that sucks: Say, do you like watching the Carolina Panthers when Cam Newton is hurt? Boy, do I have the team for you! Not only do you get an aging quarterback running Mike Shula’s patented run-and-scoot offense, you also get aging running back Jonathan Stewart AND random corner Teddy Williams. EXCITING! I’m being a touch unfair here. Obviously, the team also drafted Saquon Barkley at No. 2. Despite the fact that Barkley plays running back, this still represents the first time the Giants have not reached on a first round pick in roughly 27 years. They also handed $34.8 million in guarantees to Nate Solder, because former Patriots always flourish when they leave! Whenever the Giants find themselves cornered, they immediately attempt to reanimate the Ottis Anderson Giants in order to appease both themselves and Richie from Paramus. All the Giants have to do is invoke the phrase “smashmouth football” and immediately a roving pack of drunk, be-gunted WFAN callers will appear in front of MetLife Stadium, furiously nodding in approval. JPP was traded. Ereck Flowers is still here. Someone found a dead body at Janoris Jenkins’s house. What has always sucked: I know you’re tired of Odell takes but my man just got caught ordering cocaine pizza AND he’s going into a contract year. You will not escape the Odell takes. You will be able to power a fucking fleet of Toyotas with them. I know you think the boat trip was the apex of the Odell Take-Industrial Complex, but you will soon be proven wrong. At some point at the coming season, Odell will shake his dick in the end zone and the resulting media coverage will blot out the sun. Phil Mushnick will personally ring your doorbell and scream THIS BLACK GUY IS A BUM at your dog. Trump will tweet about it. Mister Mara will go bug-eyed, causing his monocle to drop directly into a bowl of chilled vichyssoise. The Giants will issue a public statement saying they are “aware” of the dick. Everyone will lose their fucking minds all while the Giants waste the final year of his contract by running the ball behind the weak side of the line 800 times a game. This team is run by wealthy stumpheads and it deserves to toil in obscurity for the next decade. Fuck John Mara with his own top hat. What might not suck: Oh, it’s more than possible that this team could rebound and blindly stumble into in the playoffs after cratering in 2017. That’ll buy you another five years of Eli, at the very least. Lucky you. Let’s remember a guy who sucked: I have to put Dave Brown here because every Giants fan my age hated Dave Brown from Day One and will never stop hating him. He was like watching a hangover. He is the horcrux into which Ray Handley’s soul lives on. I personally hate Dave Brown and couldn’t even tell you why. Fuck Dave Brown. I hope he’s stuck in a dead end real estate job right now. HEAR IT FROM GIANTS FANS!  Matt: We fired Sling Blade as our coach and somehow ended up with a worse coach. Ian: I watched 14 of their games last year and wanted to die. Martin: All our fans are named Kevin. Christopher: I swear we drafted Saquon Barkley instead of a QB in this year’s draft solely as an apology to Eli. Sara: I’m so fucking tired of being asked to not scream profanities in front of children. Erik: In my dreams I ride a never ending water slide of McAdoo’s slicked back hair in my descent into madness. Charlie: I got shitcanned recently and included in the email my humorless prick of a boss wrote about why I should be fired was an anecdote about how I basically shouted “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!” in the middle of our large, crowded floor when I heard Eli was getting benched for Geno Smith. I stand by that reaction. William: We draft a generational talent at RB yet are reportedly going to use him to return kicks so he can blow out his ACL or get concussed and ruin his career before it’s begun. Zachary: We drafted probably the best player available in the draft, and it won’t amount to anything because our O-line is a bunch of cardboard cutouts of Ereck Flowers looking angry. Also, the tickets are too expensive. I’ve got to about a dozen Jets games because I don’t want to shell out infinity dollars to see Eli Manning throw a pick at the one-yard line five times a day. Ryan: Due to our horrendous offensive time-of-possession, our stellar defense aged three years in two seasons. Christopher: Every time I see them run some bullshit dive up the middle for no gain on a 3rd and 9, I want to slam my dick in a car door. Peter: My dad cried right after the last two NY Giant Super Bowl wins and said the words “I don’t care about anything else in life, as long as the Giants win the Super Bowl.” He had already seen two Super Bowl wins in his lifetime. Judging by his stellar life decisions these last 10+ years he’s clearly telling the truth. He also wants to be buried in a team jersey. My dad sucks. FireStorm: For years, the only Giants jersey I ever had was a Tiki Barber that was a hand down from my older brother. When my mother asked shortly after Thanksgiving what I wanted for Christmas, I made it clear; I’d forgo everything else if I got my own Giants jersey. She asked if I had a particular player in mind, and I said no. This would turn out to be a mistake. Christmas morning rolls around, and for once I’m thrilled at the prospect of getting clothes. I see what I’m sure is my new jersey and save it for last, while trying to shake off the looming sense of dread that always seems to hang over every Giants game and is flaring up again on this Christmas morning. Finally, I’m down to the final present. As I’m working off the wrapping paper, my mother says something no one wants to hear, especially on Christmas morning. “Now, let me explain…” It was the Christmas of 2008, and here I was with a Plaxico Burress jersey. Mom informed me she was going for Eli and found out they were out of stock, so she ordered one for Plaxico. It arrived the day before he’d shot himself in the leg. Gerry: Sometime in November someone who barely watches football asked me who the Giants coach was . . .and I just forgot. There was just nothing, I couldn’t even come up with a hazy vision of a skin tag with an 8th grade haircut- for all intents and purposes, I had just wiped clean my memory of Ben McAdoo. Embarrassed, I started babbling to the stranger about random Giants marginalia, I brought up Zak DeOssie, Bear Pascoe, and even Ramses fucking Barden, all in the name of proving I wasn’t lying about being a Giants fan. And then I realized, who the fuck would lie about that? Oh yeah and fuck Kevin Gilbride. Mike: No other team fears the Giants despite their four Super Bowl wins, largely because the team is never built for sustained success. Pablo: My name is Pablo I’m from Colombia and we love soccer more than anything in this world. With some of my mindless friends, we started following some american sports, because ¿why not? Somehow, Eli “stoner face” Manning and his unbelievable two Super Bowl wins made me think that supporting this team and this sport was worth it. December of 2017 came: My soccer team lost the championship final to our biggest rival with a last minute goal. Giants became the worst team in the NFL (even my colombian mind knows that the Browns doesn’t qualify as a professional american football team). And I had the worst team in my fantasy league. ¡Yay, sports! Greetings     Jim: Our former head coach became a real life 80's movie after being the new kid in school the year before who got really popular, then slicks back his hair gets cocky, alienates his “real” friends for the popular kids before losing it all as everything goes horribly horribly wrong. The stadium looks like a fucking shipping container in a swamp and has more stairs than a MC Escher painting. Ed: Regardless of who is running the team this year, we’ll be sure to see some of the hallmarks of every Giants team since the late 90s: · Immediately committing an offensive penalty once inside the red zone. 1st and 20 from the 25 is one of the top plays in the playbook. · Allowing the opposing team’s defenders to murder the quarterback .3 seconds after the snap. · Third down defense that makes every opposing quarterback look like Tom Brady. · A great pass rush that is immediately offset by practice squad-caliber linebackers. Chris: With our history of using a top draft pick on a RB, Saquon Barkley will turn out to be Ron Dayne version 2.0. Jim: Mets- Nobody has worse luck with injuries than us. Giants- Hold my beer (takes CB Sam Beal in supplemental draft, who injures himself two weeks later and is now out for the season.) Scott: My friends bitched and complained about Eli Manning for YEARS (they refer to him as “Gump”), including during the era that he won two Super Bowl MVPs. Then they reacted to his one-game benching and the possibility of drafting Dam Darnold as if Eli was their virgin teenage sister and Ronnie from the Jersey Shore just showed up to take her out. Dennis: Listen to the litany of Jersey Shore cosplayers named Tony or Vinnie or Sal calling into WFAN and you’ll hear the complete library of racist code phrases to describe OBJ: “thug,” “lazy,” “wasn’t raised right,” all in an accent that only isn’t the laughing stock of the country thanks to Boston. The Giants fan-base is a wannabe Steelers fan-base, without the charm. I watched the draft and when I saw the last pick was traded, I fantasized that the Giants had made the trade and were taking Lamar Jackson, which would have initiated a series of pitchforks and torches down the Garden State Parkway from Woodbridge to Seaside. Pharmaceutical companies should test all products on Ben McAdoo instead of mice. Bon Jovi is the fucking WORST. Jack: We have a starting receiver lineup of Sterling Shepard, Odell Beckham and Evan Engram and instead of drafting an actual, honest-to-God QB with the 2nd pick in the draft, we draft a fucking running back. Matthew: The QB can’t throw and the line can’t block. The new GM decided to rectify this problem by getting a new RB who will average 2.5 YPC when teams stack eight in the box. Ben: The NY/NJ region is the most populous Jewish area outside of Israel, yet the owners tried to sell the naming rights to the insurance company that insured concentration camps. The NY fucking Post somehow had moral high ground and helped prevent this from happening. Mark: Look at this picture. Look at it! Davis Webb is guaranteed to be the Giants quarterback for the next 15 years because apparently there just always needs to be a doofy ass, slack jawed, clueless looking white guy with an expression that launches 1000 memes in that role. They even have the same fucking helmet hair, even when they’re not wearing helmets! I get to spend the next decade and a half of my life watching Eli Manning part two, but this time he’s shorter. Fuck Jerry Reese with rusty sporks. Matt: I hope all the giddy Saquon Barkley fanboys enjoy his next 2-3 seasons, because by the time this team’s mess of a QB situation is solved, he’ll have the knees of Professor X. Gabe: If I were forced to invite either Tiki Barber or Dave Meggett to my daughter’s birthday party, Tiki would barely – BARELY – make the cut. Keith: Our dipshit owner has the same amount of spine as Paul Ryan. Eric: Because we just had one of our worst years in team history and the payoff was supposed to be drafting our next franchise quarterback in a stacked draft. I mean why else would you bench your current 2x Super Bowl winning franchise quarterback in the middle of the season? Why else embarrass your current franchise quarterback but to kickstart a rebuild? Surely this was all lining up to punt the rest of the season to ensure a top QB draft pick, while getting Eli’s farewell tour over as quickly as possible. Nah. Let’s just use the second pick in the draft on a RB at a time where a running back’s prime is over before they even leave the draft day podium. Nah, let’s pass over the top projected QB in the draft to let our next-door neighbor fuck up his development under our shared roof instead. Nah the better plan is to give Eli all of the best offensive weapons we can without addressing the o-line. Because Eli’s mobility will surely allow him enough time to use those weapons before face-planting himself into the turf. Will: Our star receiver had the AUDACITY to do a dog-peeing celebration and get caught on camera with WOMEN USING DRUGS and that led to more hand-wringing from our dipshit owners than 2 years ago when a shitty kicker was revealed to be a wife-beating lunatic. I own this shirt and it is hands down the dumbest purchase of my life and I regret not spending the money I spent on it on literally anything else in the world: Ben: This is the shit that makes me the most furious about Gettleman: accounting for position value in the draft IS NOT ANALYTICS! Sometimes a fact is just a fact, and a number is just a number. If I see three people jump off a cliff and fall to their deaths and decide, “I’m not jumping – it killed three out of three of the last guys.” — I’m not a fucking data scientist. I’m not building a statistical model. I’m looking at a single metric and making a responsible decision. Oh, and now that he’s hired we’ll never fire him, because that’s not what franchises of our “integrity” do. Not unless he starts Geno Smith. Rob: Ben McAdoo should never again be allowed within 500 yards of an NFL facility, unless it’s to coach the Cowboys or Eagles. Ross: The Maras defended an obvious wife-terrorizing kicker, who was eminently replaceable, rather than make the easiest call in the world to fire him. The Giants’ failure is the only remaining thing that gives Tom Coughlin a wrinkly boner. Gary: Think Andrew Luck was a tragic waste of generational talent? Just wait and see what happens to Saquon. Chris: I still can’t believe that McAdoo benched Eli for Geno fucking Smith. I’d rather have Air Bud than Geno Smith. I hope someone shoots Ben McAdoo in his goatee. I hope he goes to a five star restaurant and is served an exquisite cut of filet mignon and then he fucking chokes on it. Fuck him. Dennis: The NFL season looms on the horizon like an acid hailstorm and my sort of new and not really improved Giants have replaced Mr. Weatherbee and Dilton Doiley from RIVERDALE with a GM that couldn’t go into his last team’s locker room for fear he’d get shivved and flushed down a toilet by two-thirds of the offense and a bloated lifer who was too incompetent to continue coaching the Cleveland Browns. But hey, at least they drafted an impact player at a non-fungible position and signed their most exciting player since the Reagan Administration to extension, right? Oh, wait, they drafted a running back and let OBJ twist in the wind. Russell: Most frequent plays for the New York Giants since I started watching them in 1979. 1. False start 2. False start 3. Delay of game 4. Run into center of line for negative yards. ALWAYS used on first and goal. 5. Quarterback fumble under minimal pressure 6. Allowing game winning punt return touchdown Eli: I was a chubby American exchange student in Finland (it’s pretty cold, to say the least). I stayed up till 4 or 5 in the fucking morning to watch my Giants EVERY SUNDAY and usually got drunk on Finnish vodka. During one of the last games of the season, I screamed “SHIT” as Eli threw his third interception. My roommates woke up and asked me what was wrong. Then, the camera cut to the classic Eli Manning-derp-I-threw-another-INT-face. I said, in broken Finnish, “THIS is why I’m mad!” and paused the livestream. My roommate Antti, the quietest person I have ever known, suddenly said, “This idiot’s face looks like a necrophile’s reaction when he sees that his favorite cemetery hired a security detail after another incident.” This has been the memory from my experience in Finland. Not getting shitfaced at three in the morning and screaming for the next three hours; not 3-13; not Odell’s leg being tossed into a fucking grinder; not GENO SMITH; not McAdoodoo; not whatever Mike Francesa had to say, but the guy who never said a word making the most accurate comment I have ever heard. Please fuck me with the leftovers from Odell’s fake hookers-and-blow party. Mike: Our offensive line is the tanning oil of football in the sense that it ain’t blocking SHIT and is probably getting some pasty-ass white boy burned. Dan: The thing that sucks the most about the Giants is the gameday experience. You have to wake up at the crack of dawn, deal with whatever horrors the MTA has in store for weekend travelers, and find your way to Penn Station, where you are immediately greeted by hundreds of bros and broettes holding 24-packs of Bud Light while wearing knockoff jerseys they purchased for $40 from an ad on Facebook. Once you cram yourself onto an NJ Transit train, you are taken to Hell on Earth, aka the Secaucus Rail Station. Is your journey finished there? It is not! Because then you have to go through a maze to get to your connecting train going to the Meadowlands, which does not adhere to a specific schedule and just sort of randomly, eventually arrives. You’d think once you arrive at MetLife Stadium that you were stepping into a palace of sporting entertainment, but you would be wrong. For $1.6 billion dollars, the Giants and Jets somehow managed to construct the most hollow, sterile stadium known to man. It looks like a futuristic Amazon warehouse, only without the charm. Entering the stadium means sitting in an upper level in which you can feel the breeze of jets en route to Newark Airport passing five feet above your head. But maybe the atmosphere is good, you ask??? Once again, you would be incorrect. The fanbase at Giants games consists of old men who have owned season tickets since Yankee Stadium that leave in the third quarter, thousands of fans of other teams who scoop up the tickets sold by said old men on the secondary market, and the worst Blue Lives Matter-ass faces North Jersey has to offer, whining about how Odell Beckham needs to be traded because he doesn’t have the kind of “character” as Lawrence Taylor. And yet sadly, despite all of this, we cannot even claim the title of worst fans in our own building. Once the game is over and the Giants have found a way to blow a 10-point lead with under two minutes remaining in regulation, you are transported to a literal cow pen where if you are lucky, you will arrive back across the river at Penn Station in only two hours. Fuck Matt Dodge with a cell phone tower. Matthew: Fuck Jerry Reese with all of his 3rd-7th round busts combined. Submissions for the 2018 Deadspin NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Indianapolis Colts. 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