So the good news for Giants fans is that Sunday looks good. Coming off the bye, playing at home against a team with no defensive secondary, the Giants have a real good opportunity to win, end their losing streak and improve to 6-4.
Now, the bad news.
It's hard to see them winning many more after that.
Sorry, Giants fans, but I'm not feeling this team. There's a lot of nice talk going on now, coming out of the bye. Aaron Ross is actually going to play. They're healthier (save for Kenny Phillips) than they've been all year. Some have even suggested that they've figured out what's been bugging Brandon Jacobs all year, and that he's in for a big final seven games.
And although that's all technically possible, it's not likely. The greater likelihood, given their remaining schedule and the way the Giants have played (not to mention the way they've looked when they've played) this year, is that they continue to flop to the finish and actually miss the playoffs.
Even if they beat the Falcons this week, the next three games are at Denver and home against division rivals Dallas and Philadelphia. The Broncos are a good-but-reeling team that's going to be playing at home and desperate for a win after San Diego knocks them out of first place this week. The Cowboys are a bruising, physical team with more talent on both sides of the ball than the Giants have. And the Eagles, in case you haven't noticed, have procured the Giants' number in a Phillies-Mets kind of way. They play as if they know they're going to beat the Giants, and game's site of the Meadowlands isn't going to bother them one bit.
So I'm saying 6-7 with three games left -- at Washington, home to Carolina and at Minnesota. All three winnable, though only if the Vikings have locked up the No. 1 or 2 seed in the NFC by then. But by then the Giants will have put themselves in a position where they can't slip up. And that's all assuming they beat the Falcons this week, which is no sure thing because the Falcons have a good offense and good offenses have a way of moving the ball effectively against the Giants these days.
The problem is, you don't get the feeling from this team that it's the kind of group that's going to rally for a big finish. It's a good group, a talented group, a professional group. But it's not an especially hungry group. It doesn't play with desperation. It doesn't play as if it has something left to prove or achieve. That may be because almost all of them won the Super Bowl two years ago, and it wouldn't be ridiculous to think that complacency has set in. Not everybody in the world is Derek Jeter, driven to win no matter how many times they do it. Some people are happy winning once, and spending the rest of their careers and lives enjoying the fact that they did.
These Giants have that feeling a little bit. They don't play with the same kind of "want-to" that you see from some of their opponents and other teams in the league. This isn't any kind of indictment on them as people or even as players - just an observation that indicates they might not be in a position to take advantage of all those post-bye-week advantages they're supposed to have.
Sometimes, no matter how good things look at the start, it's just not your year. These Giants, unfortunately, look like they're going to turn out to be an example of that.
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