The euphoria that the Jets gave their fans upsetting the Eagles last Sunday ought to serve as a timely reminder to the New York Football Giants that there is no better place to win than New York and New Jersey.
Giants fans have seen their 2023 Giants twice at MetLife Stadium:
Cowboys 40, Giants 0.
Seahawks 24, Giants 3.
Giants fans deserve so much better than this.
And the Giants know it.
They know they have not given their loyal fans a product worth their time and money.
“We gotta go out there and fight for the fans,” newly-signed Justin Pugh, the Giants’ first-round pick in 2013, told The Post.
“Home field needs to be an advantage. In all my years playing, the toughest places to play usually give a point differential to the home team, and we need to get that, and get that from our fans, and we need to give them that energy to cheer for us.
“I know so many Giant fans out there — I am a Giants fan.
“We gotta go out there and fight, we gotta put on a show and we gotta start winning games. That’s the bottom line.”
It doesn’t matter to Pugh that he was not part of 64-3.
“In my opinion they’re the best fans on planet Earth,” he said. “There’s nothing more I want to do than win here. I want to be able to walk down the street and interact and have fun with the people, and go to dinners and see people out in public and have those interactions.
“Selfishly, I want to win — it improves my quality of life, it improves their quality of life. When this place is buzzing, there’s no place like New York City when it’s buzzing when we’re winning.”
Pugh experienced it with the 2016 Giants playoff team.
“There’s nothing more I want to do than to give these fans something to cheer about on Sunday,” he said, “and every single guy in this locker room feels the same way.”
It only seems like an eternity ago when the 2022 Giants whipped the Colts to reach the playoffs for the first time since ’16 and fans chanted for Daniel Jones and wrapped their arms around their surprise team that defied expectations under a rookie Coach of the Year.
“Our goal — it’ll never be just to make the playoffs,” Brian Daboll said that day. “That’ll never be just our goal.”
Their immediate goal on Sunday against the Commanders: get to 2-5 or else.
With Tyrod Taylor likely at quarterback, make Giants fans forget 64-3.
“We haven’t put a product out there that anybody should be happy about,” Saquon Barkley told The Post, “especially us in this locker room, we know that, especially in those home games so far. We get a great opportunity to go back home in front of our fans and play a division opponent and try to get the season back on the right track.
“We’re not naive to the fact that they spend hard-earned money to come and watch us play and support the team, but at the end of the day it’s like we care, we really do care about what’s going on with our season, and we want to save it, and we want to be able to play at the level that we know we can play.”
Through the debilitating two-and-out head coaching years and end of the Eli Manning Era, Giants fans had been a disenchanted, disillusioned lot, and who could blame them? Halloween had become a time in their lives for tricks but no treats. They will show up on Sunday fearing that 2022 was nothing more than an aberration.
“It’s nothing something that I’m proud of, it’s not something that we’re proud of as a team,” Darius Slayton said, “but all we can do is to be better going forward.”
The high-priced Commanders’ defensive front versus the Giants’ musical chairs offensive line is problematic at best. The Giants’ offense could use a seeing-eye dog to direct it to the end zone, so it will be up to Wink Martindale’s defense to build on its relentless suffocation of Josh Allen and find a way to win this one against Sam Howell.
“The Giant standard is the Giant standard,” Carter Coughlin told The Post. “That precedes every coaching staff that’s been, you think of Giants football, there’s a standard of that. and we are working every single day to be at that standard. I would tell Giants fans you can expect a bunch of guys who are gonna go play their butts off.”
Last year was a glorious time to be a fan, a glorious time to be a Giant. As the Jets collapsed, they became the toasts of the town. It isn’t much fun being the roasts of the town. Ask Evan Neal about that.
“They deserve better,” Wan’Dale Robinson told The Post. “Those fans, they pay a lot of money to come watch us play. They want to win just as bad as us sometimes.”
Barkley, who had not sniffed the playoffs from 2018-21, embraced the love affair between the Giants and the fan base last season.
“We want to get this thing back on track, and we want their help, and we need their help,” he said. “So my message to them would be: Be the fans that we know you could be. Come in there, be loud, give us the energy that we need, and we’ll feed off each other.”
Giants fans will show up starving on Sunday. Don’t feed them 64-3.
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