They brawled after the game, Golden Tate versus Jalen Ramsey rekindling a family feud, so these are the Fighting Joe Judges, all right.
No offense, but the problem is the Giants have no punch.
And it makes them nothing more than a club fighter. An 0-4 club fighter.
Daniel Jones is the quarterback and Jason Garrett is the coordinator, and Dave Gettleman built this offensive line and … and … the Worst Offense In Football is averaging 11.75 points per game.
Because Jones failed to get his team in the end zone for the second straight time.
Your New York Football Giants offense: Daniel Groans.
“It’s certainly frustrating for me,” Jones said.
No one fought harder than Jones, but his endgame interception was the nail in the coffin.
“Those are the opportunities you want as an offense,” Jones said.
Daniel Groans: he hasn’t thrown a touchdown pass since the opener.
Daniel Groans: He has 17 interceptions over 16 career games.
It wasn’t very hard to see how badly Jones (23 of 36, 190 yards) wanted this game, how desperately he craved it.
He had looked lost earlier, but it was the second half now and he was rumbling around the right end looking for 6 yards for a first down and refusing to slide, taking a monstrous hit on his left shoulder from Micah Kiser that hurtled him out of bounds.
If Nick Gates getting into a scrap with Aaron Donald earlier wasn’t going to fire up the Fighting Joe Judges, perhaps this would do the trick.
The Giants defense had already begun punching Jared Goff’s Rams in the nose, and all of a sudden, a running game materialized, and Jones rolled left in fourth-and-1, and threw across his body for Kaden Smith for 10 yards, and kept dissecting the Rams defense until he faced third-and-4 at the 9, and threw high in the back of the end zone for Darius Slayton.
Field goal.
Rams 10, Giants 9.
A game there for the stealing. A game that could give the Giants much-needed confidence and Judge his must-needed first win.
And then Goff found Cooper Kupp all alone over the middle thanks to a busted coverage with a 55-yard touchdown pass.
“Miscommunication on the back end,” James Bradberry said.
Moral of the story: You can’t win in the league if you can’t score touchdowns.
Jones came charging back one last time, from his 20 with 2:05 remaining, found Darius Slayton for 33 yards, escaped a pocket scrum a la Eli Manning in the Super Bowl, didn’t have David Tyree and his helmet at his disposal, so he ran for 13 yards, ran again for 11 more (6-45 rushing), and soon he was 18 yards from that end zone.
He stepped up and looked for Damion Ratley.
Could have run.
Had one timeout left.
Decided not to run.
“I may have had the opportunity to run,” Jones said.
He telegraphed another throw and Darious Williams made the diving interception at the 4 that kept the Giants in lockstep with the Jets in the Trevor Lawrence Bowl.
Asked what he could learn there, Jones said: “You can’t force the ball in those situations.”
Judge curiously took the ball out of Jones’ hands fourth-and-4 at the Rams 48 with just under 10 minutes left and then asked him to convert a fourth-and-11 at the Rams 31 with 2:46 remaining. Jones threw high for Tate on fourth-and-11.
The interception was his first turnover of the game because he had recovered his own fumble in the first half.
At least he is a fighter.
“Obviously we want to do our fighting between the whistles for 60 minutes,” Judge said of the Tate-Ramsey scuffle. “That’s not the way we want to be as a team.”
With the Cowboys in disarray, the season starts next Sunday.
“If they don’t score, they don’t win,” Bradberry said.
Such is the mantra of defensive players forced to bite their tongues. If the Cowboys don’t score, the worst the Fighting Joe Judges can do is tie.
