It is still disconcerting when a football stadium looks and sounds the way MetLife Stadium looked and felt Sunday afternoon. It is still a shock to the system when the players wearing blue jerseys are booed when they jog onto the field, when the guys in the yellow helmets are cheered when they convert a third-and-7.
That is the soundtrack of this building these days, of course, as this endless toothache of a football season grinds toward the finish line. A week ago, MetLife sounded an awful lot like Oakland’s Black Hole when the Raiders visited the Jets; somehow, the Jets shook that off and actually seemed to draw a little inspiration from it.
Not so much this time. The Cheeseheads were in abundance. There were Packers jerseys everywhere. When Aaron Rodgers did Aaron Rodgers things — and he seemed to do that whenever he wanted to all across this 31-13 Packers win — the only way you could tell the game wasn’t being played at Lambeau Field was the Giants logo in either end zone.
Jeez, there was even snow on the ground for most of the game.
“When you don’t win,” Giants coach Pat Shurmur said, “you have to expect that.”
He was talking about a crestfallen fan base, and the vigorous criticism that has more and more been aimed at the men who run the Giants. This was an eighth straight loss for the Giants, and there is no end in sight.
At some point, someone is going to have to take Shurmur aside and remind him that, for better or worse, nobody is much interested in hearing the way he qualifies and quantifies these losses. That happens every week now.
“The score got away from us in the end,” was how he started his postgame remarks, and while that might technically have been true (the Giants were within 17-13 after three quarters) the parts of the game where the score gets away count. It has been a four-quarter game for each of the NFL’s first 100 years. Another Giants coach from another time used to say there are no medals for trying; there are also none for playing 45 solid minutes of a 60-minute game.
“You get a chance to watch us 20 minutes a day,” Shurmur said of one interrogator, falling back to a handy standby he’s used two weeks in a row now, that those of us not on the practice field aren’t privy to just how good these guys look in practice. Guess what? A chef can cook a mouth-watering steak in the privacy of his own home; if the ribeye he serves at his restaurant tastes like rat, he’s going to have a problem.
There was a new one this week. Someone brought up quarterback Daniel Jones’ turnover issue. He had three interceptions Sunday.
Shurmur: “Those were throws. They weren’t fumbles.”
Back to our chef: if he gets the steak right but his creamed spinach tastes like sour mud, he’s still going to have a problem.
The truth is, this was a bad week to be building a moat filled with excuses for your football team. The 0-11 Bengals beat the Jets in Cincinnati (ending a most unlikely three-game winning streak for the dreadful Jets). The 2-9 Redskins beat the Panthers in Carolina (leaving the Giants alone in last place in the NFC East). The Dolphins beat the Eagles for their third win, after spending much of the first half of the year acting like 16 losses this year wouldn’t be enough to satisfy them.
Now, if you are one of those who seek silver linings out of such things, all of that does help the Giants’ draft stock significantly. So there is that.
That doesn’t dissolve the depression that settles above the soul of Giants fans. Face it: Tanking was always something other teams did, other franchises. That wasn’t the Giants’ way. That wasn’t in their DNA.
“Some of these young players are learning on the job,” Shurmur said, “and it isn’t always easy.”
Nothing is easy about the Giants, or about this unending slog of a season. Not the games. Not the excuses. Not the abject surrender of MetLife Stadium to whoever the visiting team is in any given week. None of it.