Well, standing by my 4 week guns, I have to say that this Giants team just isn't very good. It is almost inexplicably so. It is like the excellent play from last year never happened.
The O-Line we have been trying to build for literally over a decade still hasn't become anything better than the unit that drove Eli Manning into Early Retirement, but it isn't a total surprise.
Part of the problem there is you cannot piece an O-Line together liek assembling a machine. They need time to develop and grow together to gel as a unit, and part of the problem is we have made it our culture to constantly rotate in new players, free agents, draft picks, etc, so the line never gets to set. By the end of last season, the mediocre line we had put together was playing better than the one we have now, which includes a rookie at Center (a problem I saw coming). While this isn't entirely unanticipated, it is an impact worse than I expected and this Offense is just utterly lifeless, which quite frankly is just bizarre on paper.
The Defense is just harder to explain. Last year this team had a deep playoff run based on excellent Defensive play calling and the DC getting maximum performance out of his players, who were really playing over their heads all season and dragging our weak offensive efforts across the finish line to a narrow win time and again.
This year, on paper, the team seems only to have improved on D with most the starters returning and adding some important new players in the backfield, but the execution is just trash. All the missed tackles is just just a show of poor effort and a lack of discipline that is perplexing, despite the known issues of the coaches going soft on them in camp and pre-season to try and avoid injuries.
My expectation is that this Team will probably come together and start to perform like like years standard or better later this season, but too late to have it really be meaningful, but at this point, the fanbase is already in an uproar, so my only hope is that Ownership recognizes this team is only in the 2nd year of the new rebuild, and is patient enough to let the Team develop into an actual Team and not the disjointed group of assembled parts that they seem to be right now.
Gets back to the old adage about trusting the system and letting it work sort of thing. It is needed and right now this team doesn't seem to have it.