The New York Giants finished with a 4-13 record last season, but they weren’t your garden-variety last-place team.
The Giants were very competitive in most of their games. They could have very well ended up 7-10 or 8-9 had they been able to finish out games. They squandered five fourth-quarter leads last season, three of which were 10 or more points. They also were 1-7 in one-score games.
Sign of a bad team? Sure. The reasons were aplenty: Bad coaching, poor conditioning, lack of depth due to injuries, and being short on talent. They seemed to run out of gas late in games, and a change across the board was called for.
Enter veteran NFL coach John Harbaugh to instill and/or reverse all of those factors that made the Giants losers the past three seasons.
But Harbaugh has had his own fourth-quarter issues in his career, as pointed out by Ryan Dunleavy of The New York Post:
The Ravens blew 18 double-digit second-half leads during Harbaugh’s tenure. No other head coach had more since at least 1991, although that’s a double-edged sword because few coaches last as long as Harbaugh (19th season) or hold as many leads and win as often as Baltimore did from 2008-25.
So, as you might expect, there has been a healthy dose of fourth-quarter situational periods during the first week of training camp, though Harbaugh says that is “always” a point of emphasis for his teams.
The Giants have been practicing situational football since Day 1 at camp this summer. It’s all football, all the time under Harbaugh, but can he fix this team’s late-game issues?
“We’re focusing on the things that we think we really need to get good at for this team,” Harbaugh said. “We throw everything at them right away on every situation we can think of. So, by the time we’re through the first 10 days, we’ll have hit pretty much all those situations.
“And it’s OK if we don’t know exactly what we’re doing or we don’t quite have the play calls down yet. We want to expose them to all those situations right out of the gate because those things are going to be things that actually win you games. Those are game-winning play opportunities usually. So, we want to be as good as we can be at that stuff.”
One thing is for sure. The Giants will be better conditioned both physically and mentally. That should prepare them to play 60 minutes every week. Now come the tweaks. There’s a lot of newness this season, and it could take some time for this group to gel.
This article originally appeared on Giants Wire: New York Giants aim to be better late in games under John Harbaugh
Reporting by John Fennelly, Giants Wire / Giants Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By John Fennelly, Giants Wire | USA TODAY Network
