The New York Giants upset the Indianapolis Colts in Week 17, ending a record-setting and embarrassing 10-game losing streak while doing what might be seen as irreparable harm to the team’s long-term outlook.
The win knocked the Giants from the top spot to the fourth spot in the 2025 NFL draft, essentially putting them out of reach for one of this year’s top quarterbacks — Miami’s Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders of Colorado.
The Giants themselves don’t care. They are paid to play and paid to win. On Sunday, they finally put together a winning effort. It did wonders for the short term but could have altered the franchise’s direction for years to come.
Many fans seem to think there is an alternate universe regarding the goals of professional sports coaches and players. There isn’t. Tanking doesn’t exist in the NFL. You can’t play this game half-speed and the league expects every team to put their best foot forward every week to preserve the integrity of the game.
“You play to win the game,” former NFL head coach Herm Edwards once said.
He’s right. Every coach currently working in the league repeatedly says and believes this.
“We can control what we can control,” Giants head coach Brian Daboll said on Monday. “We come in, we do everything we can to prepare for the week and go out there to play as good as we can play, coach as good as we can play, and that’s where our focus is.”
Daboll believes getting a win, as meaningless in the standings as it was for his team, did wonders for the players and chased away the dark clouds that had been hovering over the building all season.
“It was good to see smiling faces after they laid it on the line and did a lot of good things and competed out there for 60 minutes,” he said. “Again, that’s what we preach, do everything you can do during the week preparation-wise, taking care of your body, nutrition, sleep, all the necessary habits you need to do and then go out there and execute on game day. So, you do all those things, it doesn’t guarantee you anything, certainly, but it’s good to get the result when you put as much into it as these guys do.”
The “tanking” talk in the NFL won’t go away until the league institutes a draft lottery system. The other three major professional sports leagues have lotteries while the NFL still employs a “worst-to-first” draft order.
Daboll was asked if the league would benefit from a lottery system, but he did his best to dodge the issue.
“Yeah, that’s not my cup of tea here,” he said. “You got to ask somebody else that. I just know that these guys come in every day, and they put a lot into this, give everything they have each week.”
Either way, the fact is there is no lottery system in place at the moment and the Giants aren’t done with this season. They have one more game to play — against what may be a scaled-down Philadelphia Eagles team — this Sunday.
A win will likely send them for another tumble down the draft order. Daboll has other things on his mind. Like closing gout this miserable season on a high note.
“Our focus is really on the task at hand. We have a lot of guys that are committed to trying to do things the right way and competing at a high level,” he said. “When you play the way those guys played yesterday, again, all the credit goes to those guys, then you get the results that we all covet. So, our focus is going to be on this week and doing everything we can do to prepare for this game.”
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