Darius Slayton has been around long enough to know what it looks like and what it feels like when it is feeble.
“Exactly,” he said Monday. “Yeah, I definitely have. So, I know the difference.”
Slayton, Daniel Jones and Dexter Lawrence are the longest-tenured Giants players, all arriving in the 2019 NFL Draft.
Slayton has seen some good (the 2022 playoff team) and far more bad during his time with the Giants. He has most often been the pass-catching leader for offenses that ranked near the bottom of the league.
He and his guys are once again bringing up the rear, averaging only 15 points a game, which is 30th in the league, tied with the winless Jaguars.
This is nothing new for Slayton, but he sees signs that the offense has more hope this season than in past years, when the numbers were grim and the vibes were more grim.
“I don’t know if you remember way back, like the mid-2000s, Alabama and LSU played the national championship game and it was like the worst offensive game ever because neither team got past the 50,” Slayton said of the BCS title game in January 2012, won by Alabama 21-0. “That’s not us. If that was the case, then that would be, ‘We’re in Hell. We can’t get anything going. We can’t move the ball.’
“We got into scoring position multiple times against Dallas. We scored I think on every drive in the first half, and then in the second half, we got into scoring position other times. If it wasn’t for a penalty here or there, or better execution by us here or there, we would have been in scoring position some more. That tells you that we’re getting into the scoring position and now you just have to finish from there. The encouraging part of that is that we are getting down there. If you’re not getting down there then you don’t have a chance in the first place. I would say that going forward is what we will try to hang our hat on is, ‘All right, we have done a good job of getting there and now we have to finish when we get there.’ ”
Yes, the Giants are staying on the field on offense. Their time of possession of 31:07 per game is 10th best in the league. There have been 10 three-and-outs (out of 41 possessions) in the first four games, which is not great but also not as bad as it has been around these parts.
The Giants are also moving the ball. They have 12 trips in the red zone, tied for 15th in the league.
They are certainly not great, but also not terrible when they get down there, with six touchdowns. That 50 percent success rate in the red zone is tied for 17th in the league.
“If you watch our games, we’ve moved the ball in every single game,” right tackle Jermaine Eluemunor said. “Obviously, the Vikings game we could have moved it a little bit better, but we were still moving the ball in that game. If you watch the Vikings now, a lot of teams struggle against that defense. I feel like we played a pretty good game against them, just weren’t clean enough and didn’t execute enough. But then you watch the other three games, we’ve moved the ball up and down the field on all three of those teams and all three of those teams have really good defenses. So, I think that we’re really close and I think that we’ll see that this week.”
And now for something completely different. There are several statistical gauges that indicate the Giants are not extremely close to breaking through.
Their yards-per-play of 4.7 ranks 27th. Their rushing yards per attempt of 3.4 is dead last at 32nd. Their passing yards per attempt of 5.8 is tied for 25th. Their six turnovers is tied with four other teams for the sixth-most in the league.
This past weekend gave the Giants a chance to kick back after their frustrating 20-15 loss to the Cowboys, a respite before Sunday’s game against the Seahawks in Seattle.
At 1-3, the Giants are alone in last place in the NFC East, mainly because their offense continues to let them down.
“When you watch the NFL specifically, you start to realize that sometimes you think that it’s all going great for some team or another,” Slayton said. “For example, the Bills before [Sunday night] they were rolling. I think they put up almost 40 or they put at least 30 plus every game. And then last night they’re playing the Ravens, and they look like they’re in hell. The NFL is like that.
“You realize that sometimes you have a perception because of media and highlights and things like, oh, ‘There’s bombs over Baghdad there.’ It just kind of shows you that this league’s really competitive. You’re not just going to go out there and beat the brakes off everybody.”
At this point, the Giants would settle for finding enough points to beat anybody, period
