New York Giants: Three things we learned in loss to the Falcons

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New York Giants. Pat Shurmur (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images) /

Pat Shurmur’s coaching blunders are costly

The New York Giants are barely a good enough team to overcome one mistake let alone multiple mistakes like the ones they have been making.

This week vs the Falcons, it was Pat Shurmur who was making wrong decision after wrong decision.

He went for a 4th down instead of settling for a field goal earlier in the game. That was fine. You need to be aggressive to win games vs the Falcons.

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However, once that didn’t work, after what was a bad play call, he kept trying to be aggressive.

Okay, the new NFL is aggressive. The Chiefs run up the score, the Patriots are aggressive and the Eagles won the title last year by being aggressive.

Here is the thing though, the Giants do not have that kind of talent to execute it well every time.

Had Shurmur been aggressive and it worked, fine they could have potentially sacrificed points later.

But the second he tried it and it didn’t work, he needed to go back to settling for points. Just play it smart and bank them.

The Giants then scored a TD. A higher probability extra point field goal would have put the Giants down seven .

Instead, Shurmur was aggressive and went for the two point conversion. Once again, they failed to break through.

At the end of the game, Shurmur once again failed to be competent in play calling.

His two-minute drill with no time-outs almost ended with having Eli Manning try to run it twice near the goal line and failing. They scored with second remaining but gave themselves no time to try to comeback to win.

This is not the first time Shurmur has cost the Giants this season.

He has multiple instances of making the Giants path to victory more difficult, the undisciplined Odell being back on punts in Carolina for example.

The culture is a mess with the Giants too.

Odell is out speaking non-ideally about his team, there are mixed opinions about Eli Manning’s future, and the Giants are exactly where they were this time last year.

At last year they were not wasting the talents of Saquon Barkley.

I’m not saying that Shurmur was the incorrect hire.

I’m just saying it is really difficult to pinpoint what exactly he has done differently from the old regime, we should be seeing changes by now.

He needs to bank some wins and soon or his Giants tenure might be short-lived or really difficult to save.

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