First, they really weren’t as bad as their record suggested a season ago. I won’t pretend to suggest this was a good team, but the Giants were 1-7 in one-score games. Some of those games weren’t quite as close as they seemed -- and they included losses to backup signal-callers Jake Haener and Tanner McKee -- but there also were some competitive performances.
Even if the Giants are luckier, though, no one will be excited if they are merely a bad team with reasonable outcomes. Is there a universe in which they actually have the underlying talent to be more competitive? Maybe. That starts, as it does for virtually every good or great Giants team, with the defensive line. Through the first eight weeks of 2024, they had a whopping 12.5% sack rate, the best figure for any defense through the first eight weeks of a season since 2000. With the shift away from the Don Martindale scheme, they also did that while blitzing only 29% of the time, which was just above league average.