Giants Face Stretch of Tough Opponents, but Harbaugh Says Expectation Stays the Same

The good news for the New York Giants is that they still lead the NFC East with a 5-3-1 record. Their wins have come against teams that, except for the Los Angeles Rams, all had losing records heading into their Week 10 games.

The bad news is that things are about to get real for the Giants, schedule-wise. New York is set to face teams with winning records in five of its next six games: Jacksonville, San Francisco, Seattle, Cleveland and Detroit (with a Week 12 game against the struggling Colts sandwiched in there).

Four of those five opponents, except Cleveland, rank in the top 10 league-wide in point differential. Jacksonville is the runaway leader at +108 heading into Sunday’s Week 10 games.

The Giants aspire to win the NFC East despite their 24-21 loss to Washington on Thursday night. If they also hope to hang around in the postseason once they get there, the quality of opponents they’re about to face over the next few weeks will make for a good litmus test of what this group is really made of for head coach John Harbaugh and company.

Harbaugh said his confidence is high in every opponent they face and in their chances of winning, noting that the expectation is to win every single game.

“Every game that we go into play, we’re taking the field planning to win,” he said. “We’ll be preparing that way, and that’s what we’ll be doing. We’re going to win as many of them as we can. If we win them all, we win them all, but we’ll win as many as we can.”

And lest anyone think the pressure to win against the tougher opponents is any higher for the Giants at 5-3-1 than it would be if they were 6-2-1, it is not.

“We don’t live in that scared world. I said it was an important game before the game for that very reason. But now you don’t sit back and go, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to beat a heavyweight or whatever you want to call it,’” he said.

“It’s the National Football League. We’re planning on going out there, playing, and winning the game. So we don’t look at it from that perspective.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what record the opponent brings to the table when it comes up on the Giants’ schedule. The stats don’t matter either.

“These guys are going to go play the game. They’re not going to go into the game saying, ‘Oh man, this is going to be a tough one for us to win,’” Harbaugh said.

“They’re all tough to win. Every single one of these games is going to be a big challenge. Every single one of these games is going to be really hard to win. It’s tough to win football games in this league. I think we all understand that, don’t we?

“So we’re going to be fighting in every single one of those games to win every single one of those games when they come up, starting with the Jacksonville game. That will be our focus. We’re going to expect to win the game.”

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