ARLINGTON, Texas — Even when they don’t play soft, the Giants still find it incredibly hard to win.
One week after two of the team’s best players criticized the “soft” performance in a blowout loss at home, the teetering Giants avoided embarrassment in front of a national audience Thursday, but weren’t quite up to matching the headed-nowhere Cowboys in a 27-20 loss on Thanksgiving.
The Giants (2-10) suffered their seventh straight loss overall — tied for the seventh-longest losing streak in the franchise’s 100-year history — and dropped their eighth straight in the rivalry.
The Cowboys (5-7) snapped their six-game home losing streak in front of 92,196 at AT&T Stadium, where the Giants have not won since 2016.
Making his first start of the season and first of his Giants career in place of the injured Tommy DeVito, quarterback Drew Lock engineered a 70-yard touchdown drive on his first touch. Tyrone Tracy punched in a 1-yard touchdown after earlier converting a fourth-and-1.
Sign of things to come? Not exactly.
With head coach and play-caller Brian Daboll’s job security under scrutiny, the Giants netted 70 offensive yards over their next seven possessions combined. Of those 140 yards, 49 came on two broken-play scrambles by Lock.
Somehow, that was enough production to hang around in a 27-13 hole so that a 76-yard fourth-quarter touchdown drive — capped by yet another Lock scramble from the 8-yard line — made it a close game.
When the Giants needed one big play from their defense — on a third-and-3 just after the two-minute warning — to get the ball back with a chance for an unlikely comeback, Tyler Nubin and Adoree’ Jackson allowed a three-yard completion to Brandin Cooks.
Just good enough to lose.
It did not take longer than the second possession for Lock to make the kind of catastrophic mistake that the Giants were hoping to be free of when they benched Daniel Jones and bypassed Lock for third-stringer DeVito.
After Devin Singletary was knocked back off his chip block by DeMarvion Overshown, Lock still tried to force the screen pass to Singletary, but Overshown tipped the line-drive pass in the air, caught it and returned a 23-yard interception for a touchdown and a 13-7 lead.
The defense had its own issues.
The Giants missed eight tackles on the Cowboys’ 16 plays in the first quarter alone, according to Next Gen Stats, and set a dubious modern NFL record (since 1933) by going an 11th straight game without an interception.
The pass rush — the supposed strength of the rebuilt roster in the post-Saquon Barkley and Xavier McKinney era — went without a sack for the third time in four games. Meanwhile, the Cowboys harassed Lock into six sacks, with third- and fourth-string offensive tackles Evan Neal and Chris Hubbard offering little resistance.
The Giants caught a break not facing quarterback Dak Prescott, who has won each of the past 13 games he has played in the rivalry but is out for the season due to a severe hamstring injury.
Or so it seemed.
Cooper Rush, who spent some time as a third-stringer with the Giants in 2020 because of his relationship with then-offensive coordinator Jason Garrett, made his 10th career and fourth straight start.
A scrambling Rush nearly fumbled away a golden opportunity when Bobby Okereke knocked the ball out of his hands at the 2-yard line and Micah McFadden fell on it in the end zone to satiate a defense starved for takeaways.
But replay review overturned the fumble. One play later, Rush floated a touchdown pass to Cooks for a 20-10 lead.
Rush jumped on top of another red zone fumble later in the third quarter to preserve possession for another touchdown that turned the game into a blowout.
The Giants are left as the only team in the NFL without a win at home (0-6).
The Cowboys improved to 34-22-1 on Thanksgiving, including other wins against the Giants in 1992 and 2022.
