Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NFL

Nightmare year for Giants shows no sign of stopping

CHICAGO — When he finds himself in times of trouble, Tom Coughlin has always had one remedy for whatever ails him: he has Eli Manning on his side, and the other guys don’t. He has won a couple of Super Bowls with that prescription, scads of other games, too.

Why not this game?

“I believed,” Coughlin said, “because I always believe.”

And here they were, the 0-5 Giants, firmly believing that once they get this runaway train turned around, there’s no telling how far it can go in the other direction. Here they were, pushed around all night, sitting at the Chicago 35, just in front of the two-minute warning.

“We were going to use almost all of the clock and punch it in,” Coughlin said.

“We were going to figure out a way,” Brandon Jacobs said, “the way we’ve figured it out so many other times in so many other years.”

Damned if they didn’t all believe that.

“And then,” Manning would say, “I threw the ball a little high.”

He threw the ball a little high, and in some years what that means is a sticky-fingered receiver makes a miracle grab, and in some years it means the ball flutters harmlessly to the grass. In this year, when it seems all of Eli’s karmic bills have come due, it ticked off Brandon Myers’ hands and fell directly into the breadbasket of Bears cornerback Tim Jennings.

In this season, this 0-6 mess of a season, it means one more loss, this time 27-21, this time with a side order of heartbreak added to the weekly mess of bad blocking and bad tackling and generally bad football, this time when even the most reliable of past Giants weapons — ball in Eli’s hands, just enough time left on the clock — ends in a puddle of futility.

“There’s no solace in doing reasonably well but losing,” Coughlin said, coining a motivational phrase that will probably not be borrowed by a preponderance of student body cheering sections.

No. There’s no solace in this at all. In fact, there seems to be more than a hint of Groundhog Day at work here. For the third straight week, Coughlin exhausted his weekly supply of the old Rich Kotite standby “We played HARD” (and, yes, when Rich Kotite’s name appears in the newspaper, it is not a sign that things are going well for the home team). Antrel Rolle, for what feels like the sixth straight week, vowed he and his teammates would, again “look themselves in the mirror,” a mirror that has to be cracked in a thousand pieces by now.

And for the sixth straight week, poor John Mara looked ashen-faced as he walked around the locker room, consoling some players but looking in dire need of consolation himself. If you know Mara even a little, you understand this season is killing him, and not just because of the fact he happens to own 50 percent of an 0-6 team.

No, Mara came of age during the horrid era of Giants futility, the ’60s and the ’70s, 18 straight years of playoff-free football. The last time the Giants were 0-6, in 1976, Mara was freshly graduated from Boston College, just starting Fordham Law, and every Sunday was like dying a new death. The Giants lost a good chunk of a generation in those days, kids all around New York and New Jersey who abandoned the Giants (and the equally moribund Jets) in favor of the Cowboys and the Raiders and the Dolphins and the Steelers.

“Every time I see someone from around here with a Cowboys jersey on,” Mara said a few years back, “it makes me sick to my stomach.”

The Giants have been too successful too often across the past 30 years to worry about a second exodus of fans, but the more pressing concerns are just as real, and just as worrisome. This is a football team in utter disarray; the list of things they do poorly seems to stretch endlessly. And not even the folly of the NFC East matters now; at 0-6 they already own two more losses than anyone else in the entire conference.

“It’s a terrible feeling,” Jacobs said. “Just terrible.”

At least until Thursday night, they hung onto old habits and past beliefs. Now they no longer even have those. It’s staggering to think just how terrible terrible might become.