Laughter and the usual loud chatter filled the Giants’ locker room after Wednesday afternoon’s practice.
Over here, Cam Skattebo fired ping-pong returns during an intense game. Over there, Tyrone Tracy celebrated with a chest bump after sinking a clutch pool shot.
Gone were the stunned silence and tears from after Sunday’s 33-32 choke-job loss to the Broncos. With their season hanging on by a thread, the Giants know they have little time to wallow in that all-time awful collapse at Denver.
So early this week, they tried their best to bury it — while focusing on the encouraging things they did Sunday and amid their 2-5 start.
“We know we can compete with the best,” inside linebacker Darius Muasau said. “It’s something that all the captains preach all the time: We belong with the best.”
Now comes their chance to prove it for real — in the defending Super Bowl champions’ house.
The Giants — losers of nine straight road games and still without a winning streak since 2023 — visit the 5-2 Eagles on Sunday, having just shocked them, 34-17, at MetLife Stadium two games ago.
Can they draw on that result and also on the positive moments they put together in Denver? That has to be their mentality this week, after blowing a great shot at a massive statement win that would’ve built upon the Eagles upset and boosted them to 3-4, including 3-1 with rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart starting.
Moving past a rare, brutal loss like the Denver debacle is “probably one of the harder things in life,” said slot cornerback Dru Phillips. But, he said, “You don’t have enough time to sit there and mope about it. If you’re stuck on the last stuff, it carries over.”
The Giants this week might get Darius Slayton — now their top receiver, with Malik Nabers out for the year — back from a two-game absence. As Slayton, one of this rebuilding team’s leaders, nursed his hamstring injury and watched Sunday’s disaster at home, he felt “as sick as you can be to my stomach.”
But this is his message to teammates now: “Nothing is settled by Week 7, Week 8,” he said. He points to the Giants starting 7-2 in 2022, only to stumble to a 9-7-1 finish, yet still reach the playoffs, where they won a game. The lesson: The Denver gagging “doesn’t mean you can’t go on a run,” he said.
So Slayton liked what he saw from the Giants early this week.
“This team has been very resilient,” he said. “It’s not depression. It’s not dark clouds and despair. We can win these games. It’s just a matter of finishing and making that one more play that ices it.”
Still, the Broncos game was devastating for the Giants, even though they did plenty of good things, especially on offense, as Dart continued to mostly impress.
How bad was their collapse?
They led 19-0 until 14:08 remained in the game and 26-8 until 5:13 was left. Before Sunday, NFL teams had won 1,602 consecutive games since 1970 when leading by at least 18 points in the final six minutes.
This was the Giants’ eighth-largest blown lead ever — and their biggest since 2014. But of the seven blown leads now ahead of Sunday on the Giants’ list, just three included a fourth-quarter advantage of 19 points or more (in 1996, 2006 and 2010).
Yes, Dart’s fourth-quarter interception didn’t help, as it set up a 19-yard touchdown drive that cut the Giants’ edge to 26-23 with 3:51 left.
But the Giants’ defense wilting in Denver was even more shocking, especially considering how that group dominated to begin the game and considering Dart’s 1-yard touchdown dive put the Giants up 32-30 with 37 seconds left.
The Broncos scored the most fourth-quarter points ever by a team that had been shut out through three quarters. Overall, their 33 points in the final period are now tied for the second-best fourth-quarter output in league history.
In the process of that surge, quarterback Bo Nix became the first NFL player with two passing touchdowns and two rushing touchdowns in any quarter, as the Broncos put together touchdown drives of 68, 74 and 78 yards during the fourth.
Bottom line: This made the Giants’ heartbreaking loss at Dallas in Week 2 this season look like a ho-hum defeat. Remember, in that game, their largest lead was 10 points, late in the second quarter.
But just like in that one, they allowed a crushing field goal as time expired — an indictment of second-year defensive coordinator Shane Bowen’s scheme.
The Cowboys drove 21 yards in 25 seconds at the end of regulation and got a 64-yard kick that forced overtime. Then, right after Dart scored, the Broncos drove 56 yards in 37 seconds to set up a much easier field goal (39 yards) that won the game.
This was about as crushing as it gets.
Still, the Giants shouldn’t forget that Dart — against a tough Denver defense and with a depleted receiver group — drove them 65 yards in 1:14 for that go-ahead touchdown run with 37 seconds left in Sunday’s game.
That was no small achievement in an unforgiving road setting — which is exactly what Philadelphia also will bring — even if Bowen’s defense did immediately undercut it by allowing the game-winning field goal.
Yet this remains the Giants’ big-picture reality: No matter how much progress they show and how much belief they articulate, they cannot escape the misery of losing more often than they win.
They’re now 11-30 over the past two-plus seasons. When will they get their third win this year? Last year, when they finished 3-14, it didn’t happen until after they started 2-13. In 2023, they opened 2-8 before getting their third win — and wound up 6-11.
After returning from Denver at 2-5, their schedule gets no easier: 5-2 Eagles, 5-2 49ers, 4-2 Bears, 4-1-1 Packers, 5-2 Lions and 5-2 Patriots before the Week 14 bye.
Four of those six games are on the road, where the Giants are 0-4 this season. And they’ve lost 12 straight games in Philadelphia since 2013.
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