The New York Giants entered their Week 13 battle against the Washington Redskins with a golden opportunity to extend their lead in the NFC East division. Instead, the Redskins delivered a knockout punch to Big Blue that could flip the defending Super Bowl champions’ season upside down. New York left FedEx Field defeated, 17-16.
As a result, the Giants’ playoff hopes have been substantially impacted with four games remaining on their regular season schedule.
“We have to win literally every one of our games,” New York head coach Tom Coughlin told the Star-Ledger’s Jenny Vrentas. “That’s how I look at it.”
With a one-game lead in the NFC East and the toughest remaining slate of games in the NFL, the Giants cannot afford to lose. At 7-5, they do not need to panic quite yet, but their division record (2-3 with one game left against the Philadelphia Eagles) could prove costly in tiebreaker situations with the Dallas Cowboys and Redskins. If the Giants do not win their division outright, they could be sitting home instead of defending their title this winter.
Unfortunately, it is hard to gauge the Giants right now to predict where they will be in four weeks’ time. After a dominant beat-down of the Green Bay Packers a couple of weeks ago on Sunday Night Football, the G-Men went into their match-up with the Redskins looking like a team with a potentially easy road to the divisional crown.
But this team doesn’t take an easy road to anywhere. In fact, last season was anything but easy, coming down to a Week 17 win against the Cowboys to catapult them into the playoffs and eventually on their way to the franchise’s second Super Bowl triumph in five seasons.
“Honestly, I like it that way,” defensive end Justin Tuck said, via Giants.com. “I like the fact that we have to put our A-game in every game that we play from here on out.”
But the Giants have lost three of their last four games while struggling to score touchdowns in the red zone. Their offense currently ranks 22nd in red zone offense, scoring touchdowns on just 48.98 percent of their red zone trips this season.
With upcoming games against the New Orleans Saints (first in red zone scoring percentage), Atlanta Falcons (10th) and Baltimore Ravens (12th), the Giants could be in danger if they are unable to find success inside the “green zone” as Coughlin calls it.
“You’re going to have to score in the green zone to complete what the intent was and we didn’t do that,” Coughlin said, via Giants.com. “So, we come away from a game that we felt we orchestrated the thing in the right direction for a great deal of the game, but we did not win the game.”
New York will have to scramble now with four tough tests in front of them.
Still, they are optimistic. The situation is the perfect representation of Coughlin’s motto from 2011: to “finish.” The Giants will need to finish strong if they hope to clinch a spot in the postseason. This Jekyll-and-Hyde unit could go 0-4 in that stretch just as easily as they can 4-0… it all depends on which Giants team shows up to play in each of those final four games.
Louis Musto is a contributor to the Sports Journey Broadcast Network covering the NFL and NBA. You can follow him on Twitter @LouisMusto.