The Draw Play

There are a lot of types of football games. Blowouts. Defensive slugfests. Trap Games. Comebacks. Shutouts. Barnburners. I’d like to inject a new type of game into the lexicon. The Murphy’s Law game.

For obvious reasons, this has been on my mind this week. If you aren’t familiar with Murphy’s Law, it’s basically saying that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible time”. The 40-0 drubbing of the Giants by the Cowboys on Sunday Night was an ideal example of a Murphy’s Law game. Blowouts are one thing. Shutouts are an advanced form (though not all shutouts are blowouts). What we saw on Sunday Night was a worst-case scenario for the Giants. If you’ve watched football long enough, You’ve probably seen your team suffer a game like that. A game where pretty much from the get-go things just immediately turned against your team and you knew it would get ugly.

The Giants got the ball in a horrible downpour. They effectively ran it into the Red Zone. That’s when Murphy took his crowbar to the back of the Giants knees and then kept wailing. A false start. A botched snap. A blocked field goal for a touchdown, a 7 point swing and on that play, the star left tackle and only good lineman on the team suffers a hamstring pull and the kicker gets cleated in the leg. Jones would get pulverized by Mich Parsons on the next possession, leading to a punt. Dallas would score a field goal. On the next possession, Saquon Barkley coughs up a catch and into the waiting arms of a defender, which despite not being on Jones technically goes down as his first-ever pick 6.

The Giants are built as a run-first team. Control the clock, use Barkley and Jones to get chunks, quick efficient passes. Thanks to the nightmare, they were forced very early into a must-pass game in a torrential downpour, and Daniel Jones just aint that good. Dallas had a substantial cushion and could now immediately play to their strength of rushing the passer against an injured and bad offensive line. They did, and poor Jones didn’t even have enough time to make poor decisions, although he still did, throwing a horrible pass across his body trying to make something, anything, happen. That was the offense all night after that pick-6. Just…try to do anything. Literally anything. Jones spent every play getting battered and beaten in seconds flat by the speed rush or running for his life only for the targets to drop the ball. Dallas would score another field goal and then their first offensive touchdown of the game put them up 25-o.

At the end of the half, with the only scoring opportunity they would get for the rest of the night, the injured Graham Gano would miss a chip shot field goal to ensure this sucker stayed a shutout. The second half was just Dallas taking it easy and still occasionally scoring as the Giants would stumble about, get sacked, fumble the ball, the works. The biggest play of the game for the Giants was a late-game pass to Isaiah Hodgins, who sprinted 20 yards and then fumbled it away. Even the coaching staff completely blew it, keeping Jones out on the field in the rain to get destroyed in a hopeless mess for almost the entire game.

When the blocked field goal happened, I sighed. When the pick-6 happened, I cackled. From that point on I had broken through the wall of pain and just sort of floated through the rest of the experience, dissociating from time and space.

Upon reflection though, it’s hard to get too stressed out by a game like that because sometimes games like that just happen, and they aren’t indicative of a team. The Giants could go the rest of the season winless and still never have a game go that poorly for them. A Murphy’s Law game is a fluke game, an outlier experience. The Giants might be bad this year but we’ve already likely seen the worst it will get, and while everyone deserves blame, at the same time none of them deserve too much. Shit just went wrong.

Other examples of this game that I can think of? Off the top of my head, the Titans/Patriots snow game. The Seahawks decimation of the Cardinals. The Jaguars’ famous destruction of Dan Marino in the playoffs. The Broncos/Seahawks super bowl, gone wrong from the first snap. Lesser examples might include the Patriots losing so badly to the Chiefs on Monday night in 2014 that it genuinely convinced a lot of folks the Patriots dynasty was over. The Giants losing Victor Cruz to a horrific injury in a 27-0 shutout by the Eagles. The first half of the Vikings/Colts game last year for the Vikings, and then the second half for the Colts in the rare Double Murph. Which ones come to mind when you think of your team? Which games did you watch and almost immediately knew that this was going to get ugly and you just grabbed a beer and settled in till it was over?