Shurmur Explains Why There Won't be Major Changes Made to Giants in Post Bye Action

The only thing the head coach is expecting is for more consistent football leading to faster starts.

Giants head coach Pat Shurmur is all about changing things up when they’re not working or if a better way presents itself either by design or accident.

But for those frustrated Giants fans who are hoping that Shurmur and his staff have some wholesale changes up their sleeve to help give the Giants a chance to at least equal their five-win record from a year ago, don’t expect too much in the way of changes.

“Let’s think about it for a minute,” Shurmur said Monday after the Giants returned from the bye and held their first practice of the new week.

“What does a bye week entail? You come back from your previous game, you clean that up, you have a couple of days of practice and then the league mandates that they’re off for four or five days. Then you get ready for your next opponent.

“The important thing is to go back and look at the things and try to clean up the things that you’re not doing well and keep building on the things that you’re good at. I guess my point is there’s not as much time as everybody thinks to make these wholesale changes that sometimes people think may happen.”

Before the bye, Shurmur said he was not planning to make changes on his coaching staff or surrender the play-calling duties, two significant changes that he could have made. And on Monday, he continued to insist that there are some positive signs in what’s otherwise a disappointing Giants season.

“I see what I’ve been talking about all along--there are stretches of games where there’s a lot of really good football that we’re playing, and then there are mistakes that we make that for a team like us, mistakes that cost you to lose games,” he said.

“You’re playing good football, and all of a sudden, you give up a third down. Or you’re playing good football, and you give up a big play. Or all of a sudden, you’re moving the ball, and somebody misses a block, and you have a sack-fumble.

“Those are the kinds of things you have to clean up. That’s just doing the same, being consistently good throughout. I think those are the things that when you look back on it, you say, ‘Okay, this is the handful of things that created a bad situation for us.’ Then you do what you can to eliminate those.’”

The challenge for Shurmur and the Giants moving forward is how to bring out more of whatever good they’ve seen in their self-scouting and get more of that to where they no longer cost themselves games.

“You just keep rolling,” Shurmur said. “You’re always trying to do the things your players do well and do more of that and less of the other. As you watch trends in the league or you’re watching opponents against who you’re going to play that next week, you can start to see the things that are good against that opponent. Then you have to try to do the things that your team matches up well with that opponent doing.”

In the meantime, Shurmur is hoping that the Giants hit the ground running Wednesday when they begin preparing for this weekend’s game against the Chicago Bears.

“We obviously have to start faster in our games. We’ve had a couple of games where we’ve gotten down in the last month. We can’t do that.

“I don’t know if you guard against that. You have to come out and play better early.”

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