Tom Coughlin approached the tunnel leading to the Giants locker room waving to the fans and wearing a huge smile.
There was joy all across Big Blue Nation on Monday night. After an exhaustive nationwide search that lasted nearly two months, the Giants finally found a team worse than them and finally earned their first victory of the season after their season-killing 0-6 start.
“Oh, this is what it feels like,” Coughlin said.
The Giants had not won since the final game last season. That’s a very long time.
There is no reason to look at the 23-7 victory over the Vikings any deeper than this: It was one bad team beating a really bad team. The two worst quarterbacks to play at MetLife Stadium this season: Josh Freeman of the Bucs in the season opener against the Jets and Josh Freeman of the Vikings on Monday night. He completed an abysmal 20 of 53 passes for 190 yards in his first game with Minnesota after Tampa first benched him and then cut him.
If the Giants’ luck has really changed, the Vikings this week will cut Freeman – can Christian Ponder really be worse than this guy? – and then the Eagles, who are dealing with injuries to Michael Vick and Nick Foles, will sign Freeman and start him Sunday against the Giants in Philly.
How great would that be for Big Blue?
Even though the Giants loaded up to stop Adrian Peterson, and held him to 28 yards on 13 carries, his lowest total since late in the 2011 season, Freeman’s passes often didn’t land in the same zip code as his receivers. He was exactly what the Giants needed to get out of the same sentence as the Jaguars (0-7) and Bucs (0-6) as the only winless teams in the NFL.
There was no Gatorade bath for Coughlin – that would have been so inappropriate. And the music was not blasting in the locker room. But the sense of relief was evident. This team badly needed a victory and finally got it.
“It feels like a party in here,” Victor Cruz said. ‘It feels good to get off that slump we were on and finally get one under our belts. Hopefully we can build off it and go forward.”
If the Giants could not beat the Vikings, who are now 1-5, it was fair to wonder exactly which games they were going to win this year. The only score the Giants gave up was on Marcus Sherels’ 85-yard punt return, the third punt-return TD they have given up this season.
It gave the Vikings a 7-3 lead late in the first quarter, but the Giants went ahead on Eli Manning’s 24-yard TD pass to Rueben Randle and later got a gift TD when Sherels fumbled on a punt return at his own three and two runs by Peyton Hillis, who signed last week, gave the Giants 17-7 lead midway through the third quarter. It represented the Giants’ largest lead of the season.
The Giants need to be realistic at 1-6, but they can try to make this a respectable season.
“It’s about getting back to having fun,” Antrel Rolle said. “Obviously things have been a little tense around here with starting 0-6. We never gave up on one another. We kept pushing each other.”
In a season that started with the Giants talking up the prospect of becoming the first team to play the Super Bowl on their home field, and general manager Jerry Reese ordering a Super Bowl XLVIII countdown calendar posted in the halfway right off the locker room – pretty soon it will be available at a discounted price — it took much too long for the Giants to get their first victory.
But from any angle you look at it, 1-6 sounds and looks a heckuva lot better than 0-7.
“I’m happy for our coaches, happy for our players, happy for our owners,” Coughlin said.
The victory doesn’t make the Giants’ problems go away. But a bad team like the Vikings helped camouflage them for one night. Manning, who came into the game leading the NFL with 15 interceptions, as many as he had all last season, didn’t throw an INT for the first time this season. Coughlin praised Manning’s vision and his emphasis on not giving the ball to the other team, but will it be different in Philly? Remember how Manning tossed away the first game against the Eagles a couple of weeks ago with three picks in the fourth quarter?
This was not a must-win for anything other than the Giants’ self-esteem.
They will not finish 0-16 and they will not be remembered as one of the worst teams in NFL history. But no matter what they do the rest of the season, the slop they put on the field for the first six weeks, eliminating any chance they had to play at home in the Super Bowl, does make them one of the most disappointing teams in franchise history.
That doesn’t change because they beat the Vikings. But it does allow the Giants to feel good about themselves for a few days and they really needed that.
Coughlin liked his, “Oh, this is what it feels like,” line so much he stopped by Cruz’s locker to repeat it.
They both smiled weak smiles. It took a lot longer to get the first victory but it still felt pretty good.
