The New York Football (So To Speak) Giants still have that dawg in them, trust us. They've just moved on from the mundane world of victory and defeat to the loftier pursuit of indiscriminate shame-flinging. Nobody can rip them better or faster than they can do it themselves, and they added the magic ingredient of unbroadcastable profanity to make it stick. Having that dawg doesn’t necessarily mean it is housebroken.
After their weekly pantsing, a 30-7 loss to Tampa Bay that featured Tommy DeVito looking like the winner of a North Jersey Daniel Jones play-alike contest and the defense retreating early and often as is the Giants' traditional wont, several team employees lined up to gently debate the intensely personal art of observational quitting. That is, they started pointing fingers everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, with the attached benefit of piquant naughty words for added authenticity.
Defensive captain Dexter Lawrence II: "We played soft, and they beat the shit out of us."
Rookie Malik Nabers: "Soft as fuck."
Offensive lineman Jermaine Eluemunor, who used to be a Raider and so knows this gambit intimately: "I personally don't think everybody is giving 100 percent."
Edge rusher Brian Burns: "That's ass."
These profane assessments gave the familiar losing team’s mea culpa/mouthful of postgame soot a little extra oomph. Sean McVay went with "humbling" after the Rams let Saquon Barkley dropped a port-a-potty on Los Angeles' self-esteem. San Francisco linebacker Fred Warner celebrated the 49ers' four-score loss at Green Bay with "embarrassing ... probably one of the worst ones I’ve been a part of.” Even Patrick Mahomes, who won his game, said, "I would love to win a game before the very last play."
But the Giants are better than all that, and not just because they are worse. They’re better because they not only hate themselves, but are seemingly willing to fight each other to prove it. Again, Eluemunor, who was injured in the first quarter and thus had time to formulate his thoughts more completely: "I mean, you're 2-9, you have to be real with everyone. I'm 29 years old. I'm a vet in this league and if anyone has a problem with me saying that they can come see me. I think this franchise and these coaches and these fans deserve way better. And like I said, there's a lot of people on this team giving everything they have. But it's not everyone."
With that as backdrop, almost-surely-soon-to-be-ex-coach Brian Daboll's assessment, coming off the rolling fiasco of The Daniel Jones Experiment, was as tepid and useless a capper as you would expect. "It wasn't good. It wasn't good," Daboll said. "For a variety of ... missed tackles, converting in the red zone, turning the ball back over in the red zone. We had a good week of practice. Did a lot of work and obviously it didn't show. So, no excuses."
"No excuses"? How does that compare to "That's ass"? Answer: It does not. That's meaningless coachspeak, not true leadership. It is not the same level of performative rage the players are offering one room over. Then again, this is a team that cannot figure out how to properly demote its starting quarterback and is well inured to their weekly shower of PTSD commonly referred to as Barkley Syndrome. No wonder Nabers, in complaining that he didn't get the ball enough in the early part of the game, referred to his head coach simply as "Daboll." That's not the coach losing the locker room, that's the locker room being set ablaze from inside. And rhetorical arson is Quitting 2.0.
We should note here that the Giants are taking this finger-pointing thing as close to its logical limit as they can without a player saying, "I don't know about anyone else, but I am definitely on Team Quit, and here are the names of the others." If nothing else, they are forcing the cross-hell Jets, who came off a bye but are every bit as anti-functional as the Giants, to steal the back page back tomorrow and Wednesday. The Jets already have Woody Johnson Being Jerry Jones and Aaron Rodgers allegedly not allowing his injured leg to be scanned because doctors work for Satan's medical insurance company, and hiring the 33rd Team lunatics, which includes their own former general manager Mike Tannenbaum, to help with their general manager and coaching vacancies. The Jets long ago established that they are more creative self-abasers than the Giants.
But today, by so eagerly turning on each other in public, the Giants are the pride of New York in the one thing that powers the metropolitan area’s various fan bases (excepting the Liberty, of course). No one is owning, or embodying, their own ass-hood more.
