Go ahead and admit it: Even if you’re the most loyal and optimistic of Giants fans, you’ve already got them at 1-5 even though we’re only in Week 5.
Sure, the Giants are 1-3 entering Sunday’s game against the 3-1 Dolphins at Hard Rock Stadium with a road game to follow at the even-better Bills next Sunday.
The Giants are an 11-point underdog to the Dolphins and are likely to be two-touchdown underdogs at Buffalo on Oct. 15.
Inside the walls of the Giants locker room, the players steadfastly refuse to listen to those kinds of negative expectations — as dire as it may look to outside observers who watched them lose 24-3 at home Monday night to the Seahawks and 40-0 to Dallas in the season and home opener.
The Giants have played one half of good football in four games — their second-half comeback victory in Arizona.
As dire as it all may seem, for many players, the mood inside the sanctum of the locker room changed right after the home loss to Seattle when, The Post has learned, defensive lineman Rakeem “Nacho’’ Nunez-Roches stood up in front of the team and offered some veteran perspective from his nine NFL seasons.
“Nacho shared with the team after the [Seattle] game that he was a part of the [2015] Kansas City team that started the season 1-5, and they ended up winning 10 straight games and went to the playoffs,’’ Giants defensive lineman Leonard Williams told The Post.
“A small example like that lets the guys know that we’re still in it. I think that’s really powerful, because you can only hear so much from coaches, who obviously know what they’re doing and know what they’re saying. But when you hear it from someone that’s in your locker room, it comes from a different place and you hold it a little more.’’
Nunez-Roches, 30, told The Post that, as he stood inside the locker room after the loss to the Seahawks, he felt a sense of “déjà vu’’ when he looked around the room and saw so many of his younger teammates wearing looks of disillusionment on their faces.
That Kansas City team would finish 11-5 and defeated the Texans, 30-0, in the AFC wild-card round before losing to the Patriots in the divisional round.
“I was speaking from the heart,’’ Nunez-Roches said. “It was just being in that moment and seeing some the guys’ faces, looking puzzled, like, ‘I’m doing everything I can, why am I not getting the result?’
“It’s one of those things where you just have to stay the course, and I just felt the need to say it. I’ve been there and felt that and I was like, ‘Maybe this message will touch one person.’ And I found out it touched a lot more people than I thought it was going to touch.
“It goes back to when you were younger and your mom says, ‘Don’t go over there,’ and you don’t listen to her until one of your friends says, ‘Hey, don’t go over there,’ ’’ Nunez-Roches added. “The message resonates differently when it comes from one of your peers with a different delivery. I just told them I was speaking from the heart. I felt like my message definitely got across.’’
Despite the feel-good 2022 season, which produced a playoff berth and even a postseason victory, the Giants were always going to be in for a more challenging 2023. The schedule-makers did them no favors — who in the world did John Mara tick off? — with seven of their first 10 games on the road, including two in four days at Arizona and San Francisco.
Add to that the loss of running back Saquon Barkley and left tackle Andrew Thomas — arguably their two best offensive players — to injuries, and that compounds the issue. The regression of quarterback Daniel Jones with his turnover issues also has been debilitating.
Add to all of this is the fact that coach Brian Daboll and GM Joe Shoen never expected to make the playoffs in the first year of their rebuild, for all of the excitement that generated, it’s now become a migraine headache as they chase that high bar they unwittingly set.
“No one out there thought that the Giants were on the tier of Philly, Dallas the 49ers or anything like that,’’ former NFL guard and current ESPN analyst Damien Woody told The Post. “Most people thought that the Giants overachieved and might come back down to earth a little bit, but the way they are playing right now, they are playing like one of the worst teams in the league. Period. No one saw this type of drop from the Giants.’’
Woody recalled lessons he learned from his NFL playing days in New England.
“Bill Belichick used to tell us all the time that each year, each team is different from year to year,’’ Woody said. “On paper, you would think, ‘The Giants got a playoff win last year and seemingly upgraded the roster.’ But each team is different. I think the prevailing opinion among most people is that the Giants overachieved last year.’’
Now they’re paying the tab for that unexpected success.
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