Giants Not Panicking Despite Recent Struggles

Ask any NFL head coach, and he'll probably tell you that he'd love for nothing more than an undefeated season with zero injuries or cause for concern.

Unfortunately, that's not how real life goes. Teams are going to have their ups and downs, they're going to have to work around injuries, and they're going to have to face things that come out of left field to test the resolve of the culture that exists in the locker room.

Such is the case for the New York Giants. They currently sit at 7-4, having lost three of their last four games played. They're dealing with another rash of injuries in which they're down to, in some cases, the backups to the backups at critical spots like the defensive secondary and offensive line.

Their bread and butter, the running game, has suddenly stopped working as smoothly as it was earlier in the year. And they're suddenly starting to hear "same old Giants" from the critics who never believed the Giants were that good to begin with.

Despite it all, head coach Brian Daboll, at least outwardly, isn't panicking. He's been around the game long enough as an assistant coach and now as a head coach to realize that with the game comes the ebb and flow of a season and that all one can do is ride out the hard times by staying focused on what lies directly ahead.

"I mean, the whole season is in front of you right now. We have a long way to go, obviously, the rest of December here and the early part of January," Daboll said Friday.

"We have to focus on getting ready to play Washington, but you’re sitting at 7-4. You put yourself in a position to play meaningful games in December, which is important."

The Giants are currently in third place in the NFC East, two games back behind the Eagles and one behind Dallas, though the Cowboys own the head-to-head tiebreaker.

And although the Giants still are in a good spot to grab a wild-card berth--they would be the sixth seed if the season ended today--they probably need to get at least three more wins, if not four, against the toughest remaining schedule (.680 winning percentage) of opponents.

Daboll isn't stressing too much about things because he knows how quickly the league can change after going through that same scenario with Buffalo last year when the Bills were 7-6 after 13 games, only to finish with an 11-6 record to make the postseason, where they were eliminated in the divisional round.

"Look, anything can happen in this league," Daboll said. "I’ve said it before; it’s a humbling league. You can be on the top of the mountain one week and fall off the next week.

"The biggest thing for us is to remain consistent in the things that we try to do each week to give ourselves the best chance to win. Do they always work? No, but I think a consistent approach is the best approach."

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