The Giants Are Innovating Thrilling New Ways To Not Win

I love a good microcosm. It makes for efficient blogging, for one, and it's also helpful to have one play or drive to point to if anyone wonders How It's Going. Well, it's going badly, Steve! Fucking Steve. Fucking Giants.

For 60 minutes on Sunday against the Cowboys, Russell Wilson was awesome; the problem was overtime, where Dallas prevailed, 40-37. The 36-year-old, signed mostly to be a steady short-term presence and mentor on a team that is still several years away, looked like the QB1 of old. He was really chucking it! On balls that traveled more than 20 yards in the air, Wilson was 7-of-11 with three touchdowns, including a fourth-down precision strike to Wan'Dale Robinson with 2:44 left, and a 48-yard mortar to Malik Nabers with 25 seconds on the clock, both of which looked like they could be game-winners, and neither of which were.

"There’s been a lot of noise," Wilson said, following a Week 1 start that made it seem like he was only keeping the seat warm for rookie Jaxson Dart, and said seat was already getting pretty hot. "This game meant a lot to me. It was time to answer the call. It was like, 'Nah,' you know what I mean?"

Wilson's four quarters were good enough to earn him a few more starts, and to at least partially overshadow the stink of overtime. He went throw for throw with Dak Prescott, and each got better as the game wore on, the teams combining for nine straight scoring drives to close regulation, including three touchdowns with under three minutes remaining. It was exciting, and excellent, offensive football. The Nabers TD, for a team that isn't quite so adept at losing, might've been a clincher. But Brandon Aubrey's 64-yard field goal as time expired sent things to the extra frame.

That's when DangerRuss became DisastRuss. After completing his first two passes in overtime, Wilson was sitting on 454 yards, a career high. The Giants had second-and-short, and needed just a couple first downs to get into field-goal range for the winner. Then, this happened:

The Giants went from second-and-3 to third-and-a-mile, and the "pass" (technically a fumble) by an untouched Wilson that rolled eight yards backward and out of bounds would prove to be his least deleterious ball thrown the rest of the day.

On the first play of Giants' second drive of overtime, a dump to the running back lost four yards—taking Wilson down to an even 450 yards on the day, no longer a career high. (This was, perhaps, an even better microcosm of his and the Giants' afternoon.) On the next play, miscommunication with Nabers on the route put the ball in the hands of safety Donovan Wilson.

This Wilson-on-Wilson violence, the lone blemish on a fairly immaculate stat sheet for Russ, had the inevitable consequence. The Cowboys ticked off every last second of their two-minute drill before Aubrey booted a 46-yard winner.

I'm a big idiot. I'd been admirably stoic through the Giants' last, oh, decade of woe. I achieved this by not caring. If they wanted to go three or four games in a row without an offensive touchdown, it was simply not my problem. I could compare their play to an incident in which scores of people died by falling into a giant toilet, and move on with my day. But then this year I went and let myself feel something not unlike optimism. Their pass rush is killer, I thought, and they've got some receivers, and maybe Dart's preseason was no mirage. Maybe I could finally, actually, have a rooting interest more straightforward and less fraught than better draft position. This game tricked me into feeling hopeful, and let me tell you, that is way worse. Stupid, stupid, stupid!