Hour 5: McMonigle on Giants' Physical Identity and Monday Night Picks

Chris McMonigle (0:00)

Yes, sir, yes, sir, they're getting better. And we are getting better here on The Last Stop of The Carton Show, taking you all the way till 7 Yankee baseball should come your way. We'll let you know if we hear anything on the weather front out in Minnesota, because yes, they do play outdoors, and yes, it looks like rain all night. And to be totally honest with you, it doesn't look like much better the rest of the week, or the rest of the two days. But we're getting better, the Giants are getting better, the Jets are getting better. Yeah, I know, I'm having a little fun with Craig about which win was better, and maybe I'm taking it too far. It's not that I'm, and I want to be clear on the Giant point. Again, I would not be surprised if they go out and get beat soundly. Again, I don't know if they'll get their ass kicked, but I would be surprised with that, and that would disappoint me. But I wouldn't be surprised if they go out to LA and get beat soundly, where they really weren't in the game and the Rams had control of it for most of it, if not all of it. Like, that's part of it. I'm not declaring them a Super Bowl champion. I'm not saying they're going to the NFC Championship game. I'm not saying they're going to the playoffs. All I'm doing is reaffirming what we all thought was going to happen when John Harbaugh took the job. When John Harbaugh took the job, we said to ourselves as Giants fans, the losing is over. The being a joke is over. The New York Giants will be a football team now. They brought in a real leader. They brought in someone who's going to uplift the franchise because that's what he's done his entire career, that's what he did in Baltimore, and we will have sustained winning at some level, not Super Bowl level, not championship game level every single year. But the days of being done in October, the days of being done in November are over. This will be a competitive football team where if you don't, when you show up to play the Giants, if you don't play your best football, you could get your ass kicked and I don't care who you are.

That's New York Giants football. And that's what we all expected from John Harbaugh. That's what we all figured. That's what we all hoped for. That's what we all thought was the promise of hiring John Harbaugh. And then things happened. Things over the off season. You have different things, right? You have a wide receiver group that you're not sure if the National League Neighbors is going to play in there, working out all these older wide receivers, like Odell Beckham Jr. and Berrios, and even, you know, Smith Schuster. And you're like, man, they signed all of them. Like that's a problem. Then you have ownership. Getting involved or, you know, emails are released of the relationship between ownership and Epstein. And then you have the Jackson Dart introducing the president and Abdul Carter having issue with it. And there was just a lot in the off season. Then they hardly play in preseason. And like I said to Craig and admitted, as much as I might have projected confidence in John Harbaugh being the guy, and in the fact that the Giants were going to be this team, and the Giants were going to end their days of being a laughing stock and a joke, somewhere deep I was concerned, somewhere deep I was worried, somewhere I felt, you know what, man, we really didn't see Jackson Dart all camp. We heard a lot of things about Jackson Dart struggling at the beginning of camp and struggling with this Matt Nagy offense.

And is Abdul Carter going to make that jump to be the player we hoped? Is Arvel Ruiz, because we heard the same thing about Carter in camp last year, how great he was and it was going to be that smashing success and it wasn't. Is Arvel Ruiz really this impact player we're hearing about in camp?

Is this offense going to be ready?

Is Nagy the right guy offensively? Is Newsome and Banks going to be a real problem as you're starting cornerbacks? And maybe they still will be.

But there were moments where over the course of the off season and into camp, that maybe we wavered as Giants fans on whether or not this is going to look the way we hoped it would look. And then from the opening possession, it looked exactly how we hoped it would look. It was exactly the physical brand of football we were promised and expected under John Harbaugh.