It’s not a wonderful life for Giants fans

How some obscure Giants of the past indirectly contributed to today’s mess

The holiday season is now over, and New York Giants’ fans have been left with coal in their stockings. Not only did the team have one of its worst seasons ever, but despite tying for the worst record in the NFL they will only draft third because of their strength of schedule. This could leave them out in the cold for one of the top quarterbacks in the draft.

It’s not hard to figure out how the Giants turned out to be so bad this year. A raft of injuries, especially on the defense; Daniel Jones not performing up to his contract despite returning to health and getting an elite receiver and a competent offensive line; the secondary allowing elite receivers to routinely torch them, especially Deonte Banks; a porous defensive line against the run for much of the season; and puzzling decisions about game-day active players and starting quarterbacks all doomed this team from the start. The tough schedule only made things worse.

The more puzzling question is: How did the 2022 team, with the same head coach and general manager and a clearly inferior roster, play so well? Well enough to not only make the playoffs but win a road playoff game? Well enough to beat Aaron Rodgers and Lamar Jackson?

To be sure, that team faced an easier schedule than the 2023 and 2024 Giants did. Tennessee, Green Bay, and Baltimore, all seemingly elite opponents, were weaker than normal in 2022. The Minnesota team they beat in the playoffs had a subpar defense despite winning 13 games. Still, the Giants for the most part played well, and you don’t see teams with low strength of schedule this year apologizing for taking advantage of it. (For example, the Commanders, now the darlings of the NFL, had the league’s second-easiest schedule.)

What is perhaps under-appreciated is the seemingly minor things and people that helped things go the Giants’ way yet paved the road to the ruin they are at the moment. George Bailey was a seemingly unimportant person who had an outsized positive effect on the people he came in contact with. The same was true for the 2022 Giants. Let me be the Clarence that points a few of these people out…the only difference being that George Bailey learned to appreciate what he had, while there doesn’t seem to be much to appreciate about where the Giants are now.

Darnay Holmes

Holmes, now in Las Vegas, was a 2020 Giants fourth round pick who has never had much success preventing pass completions. In 2022 he broke up six passes, a career high. One of them may have changed the Giants’ fortunes dramatically:

Late in the Giants’ 2022 game in Washington, with the Giants nursing a 20-12 lead with a minute left but Washington knocking on the door of a possible tying score, Holmes bubble-wrapped Curtis Samuel to break up a potential TD catch but was somehow not called for pass interference. That came two plays after the possible tying TD by Brian Robinson was nullified by an illegal formation call. Holmes clearly should have been flagged on that play, but as far as the boxscore is concerned, it was a great game-saving defensive play.

There’s no guarantee that Washington would have scored, made the 2-point conversion and gone on to win the game if the refs had thrown a flag, of course. If they had, though, the Giants (9-7-1) and Commanders (8-8-1) would have switched records and places in the standings, and Washington would have made the playoffs while the Giants went home.

If so, several things might have changed. Here is what the middle of Round 1 in the 2023 draft looked like:

Courtesy of Pro Football Reference

Washington inexplicably selected Emmanuel Forbes with Christian Gonzalez still on the board. Gonzalez, an excellent press-man corner, would have fit Wink Martindale’s defense well, and Deonte Banks would not be a Giant. If not, the Giants would have had their pick of the four top wide receivers in that draft.

It’s also fair to ask what would have happened with the Daniel Jones negotiations after the season. Without the Wild Card berth and the Minnesota playoff game on his résumé, Jones probably signs a smaller, shorter contract and the Giants have more cap space for free agents. They may even have drafted a quarterback in 2024.

Randy Bullock

Bullock has had a long and good career in the NFL, making 83.5% of his field goal attempts. In 2022 he missed only three attempts and only two from less than 50 yards. The final play of the first game of the Brian Daboll era was one of those:

If Bullock makes that field goal and Tennessee wins, do the Giants get off to anything like the torrid start they began the 2022 season with? Even if they do, they wind up 8-8-1, miss the playoffs, Jones’ leverage in negotiations is less, and they draft right after Washington and probably choose one of the four wide receivers, e.g., Zay Flowers. That in turn might have changed their strategy in the 2024 draft, even if the addition of a WR1 had no effect on their 2023 record. Would they then have taken one the three “second-tier” quarterback prospects rather than Malik Nabers? Would they be further ahead now if they did?

Bullock, of course, joined the Giants the next season and made a game-ending field goal to beat Green Bay and burnish the legend of Tommy DeVito for one more week. In the end it had no impact on the Giants’ 2024 draft, since they would have finished tied with the Chargers but still behind the three teams that took QBs at the top of Round 1.

Fabian Moreau

Photo by Perry Knotts/Getty Images

Fabian Moreau has had a nondescript NFL career – good enough to get onto the field and even start in some seasons for five different NFL teams, but not good enough to stick with any team after his rookie contract ended. As a Giant in 2022, Moreau did a decent job with seven pass breakups but also was burned for five TDs. One of those, though, was not the final play of the Giants 23-17 victory in Jacksonville that lifted their record to a shocking 6-1 in Brian Daboll’s first season.

Trevor Lawrence drove the Jaguars downfield in the final minute of the game and hit Christian Kirk with a pass for what looked like the winning TD for Jacksonville as the clock expired. Moreau, though, intercepted Kirk in mid-air as he leapt to catch the pass at the 1-yard line, and then with help from teammates, gang-tackled Kirk to keep him out of the end zone to preserve the Giants’ victory. That was the high-water mark of the season. The Giants more or less limped to the finish after that, rallying to play well in a couple of games to clinch their playoff spot but rarely looking as good as they did in those first two months. As with the Washington and Tennessee games, a loss in this game would have probably denied them a playoff berth and affected how Joe Schoen constructed the roster after that season.

2022 vs. 2024

The strange thing about what happened to the Giants this season is that they had plenty of opportunities to finish the season with a record not much worse than the 2022 team but against a much tougher schedule. Both Washington games, the first Dallas game, and the Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Carolina, and New Orleans games were there for the taking. In 2022, they found ways to win many of those close games. In 2024, they almost always did not.

In so many ways the 2022 season sowed the seeds of the 2024 season’s demise. I’m not Clarence, so I don’t have a pipeline to a higher power that allows me to show you what would have been today if Holmes, Bullock and Moreau, among others, hadn’t entered the Giants’ timeline in the ways they did two years ago. They were just improbable moments in a season full of them. All we can do to explain 2022 vs. 2024 is to note that for whatever reason, the Giants rarely were able to make the key play to win a game when the opportunity arose this season. To the contrary, they made terrible plays at key moments. Some of those plays were Daniel Jones’ fault, but not all of them. Let’s see if Schoen can find some players who can make plays in key situations in 2025.