There are a few hurdles the Giants are going to want to barter if they hope to outlive their Thanksgiving Day pilgrimage to Jerry’s World. You can begin with the Cowboys themselves, in fact, since Dallas has already crushed the Giants as soon as this yr, in Week 3, and is coming off a rare annihilation of one of many NFC’s finest groups, the Vikings.
Depletion is one other. The Giants’ already-Iggy-Pop-thin receiving corps is banking on a next-man-up hero, and is on the verge of getting to name up both Amani Toomer, Homer Jones or Stephen Baker the Landing Maker simply to discipline the usual 11 on each play. The offensive line is dinged up. The secondary is wanting extra tertiary by the day.
However there's additionally this:
Would you care to guess a) who was the final Large to attain an offensive landing on Thanksgiving Day and b) who the President of america was that day?
That will be a) Dale Burnett and b) Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
That was Nov. 24, 1938. Sure. Thursday marks the 84th anniversary of that sacred occasion. Now, it’s true that whereas the Giants have been common turkey-day employees within the early days of the league (11 occasions between 1926 and ’38, the entire video games native tilts towards the since-deceased Brooklyn Lions, Staten Island Stapletons and Brooklyn Dodgers), that additionally consists of 4 video games within the Tremendous Bowl Period, beginning in 1992.
That was the yr that Lawrence Taylor executed maybe his single-most well-known play, intercepting Detroit’s Gary Danielson on the aim line and rumbling 97 yards for the game-winning TD in a 13-6 win over the Lions. It’s additionally the one a kind of “fashionable” video games the Giants have received. They’ve fallen 30-3 to the Cowboys in 1992, 26-6 to the Broncos in 2009 and 20-10 to Washington in 2017; Jackrabbit Jenkins scored the one different Giants TD, additionally on a pick-six in that ’17 recreation.
So when you haven’t gotten sufficient turkey, the Giants have been glad to furnish you with extra at any time when they’ve been on the Thanksgiving rotation.
Sure. There’s a variety of issues stacked towards Huge Blue once they journey to Huge D this time, fixing for revenge and likewise to keep away from back-to-back losses for the primary time this yr. Naturally, Brian Daboll isn’t caught up in any of that, as a result of it’s his mission to maintain issues easy for his gamers — a minimum of those wholesome sufficient to board an airplane.
“Put together to play a recreation,” the Giants’ rookie coach stated of the best way his group has gone about its enterprise this week. “It’s actually that straightforward: put together to play a recreation. It’s a brief week; all people performs them. So, do a superb job within the walk-throughs. Do a superb job on finding out the group that we’re enjoying, and guarantee that we’re able to go. Maintain our our bodies and prepare to go to Dallas.”
All the pieces the Giants have fought and clawed for this yr continues to be accessible to them, even after the buzzkill of final Sunday’s 31-18 loss to the Lions, even after shedding two of their final three video games, even with the specter of a tightly packed NFC East getting ever tighter now that the Commanders have gotten a bit frisky in latest weeks.
The Giants nonetheless have 5 of their six division video games forward of them, beginning at AT&T Stadium Thursday. They've put themselves in place for these video games to matter. And even when the Cowboys are coming in off a dominating 40-3 win at Minnesota final week … properly the hallmark of latest Cowboys groups is that the very best time to greet them is when they're coping with a prosperity that they by no means fairly know the best way to deal with.
Plus, the entire league can be watching.
“I feel it’s an enormous alternative for us,” Giants quarterback Daniel Jones stated. “It’s a divisional recreation towards a rival and on Thanksgiving. Large recreation, large alternative for us, and we’ve received to exit and play our greatest ball, play in addition to we will and see the way it goes.”
As deep because the rivalry between the Cowboys and Giants is, it’s exceptional the 2 have solely collided as soon as on Thanksgiving Day — in 1992, the dying days of the Ray Handley Period, a 30-3 shellacking that was a part of a 1-6 spin-out to shut out a desultory interval within the group’s annals.
The Giants count on a lot extra from this season. It might be useful to return house a soccer group, and never an even-more-crowded MAS*H unit.
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