Perhaps the Giants, in an effort to spice up what shapes up to be a bland “Monday Night Football” clash against the Vikings, teams with a combined record of 1-10, should tap into what the people want and declare the evening Zombie Night.
Heck, “The Walking Dead’’ on AMC attracted 16.1 million viewers last Sunday — nearly matching the Cowboys-Redskins game showing at the same time over on NBC. But, The Post has learned, there is no truth to the nasty rumor that many of those viewers, all dressed up in blue, tuned in because they thought “The Walking Dead’’ was actually the story of the 2013 New York Giants.
Tom Coughlin doesn’t look ghoulish, but he’s presiding over a team approaching Halloween still unable to rid the prefix “winless’’ from its name. This game will be the third time in seven weeks for the Giants to be featured on some iteration of the NFL’s national television package and, as far as holding an audience, they followed a similar script in losses at Dallas and Chicago by hanging in for 58 minutes before a deadly Eli Manning interception allowed even their most loyal fans to click the remote and hit the sack.
In many ways, the Giants are like the walkers in “The Walking Dead,’’ not alive (in an NFL sense), yet not dead in terms of having 10 more games to play. No one quite knows how to act, what to say, as these Giants have never been here before. Hakeem Nicks talks about a trade that won’t happen. Coughlin talks about the benching of a quarterback that won’t happen. Manning gets emotional talking about letting the team down in Chicago and faces the interception music by saying the same thing over and over. Some clamor for an audience with general manager Jerry Reese that won’t happen (until the bye week, that is).
Even Antrel Rolle’s voice has been muted, as how could it not be after so many weeks of trumpeting his team’s chances, only to see such a cacophony of terrible football each week? His urging this week to jump out on top of the Vikings — to “blow their ass out’’ — sounded more plea than prediction with a team that in the second half of games this season has owned the lead for 2:42 and trailed for 177:18.
No one knows what notes to hit. Coughlin gave the Giants off last weekend, had them in for practice on Monday and then players were off the next two days, making it four days off out of five. Yet, Coughlin bristled when this respite was characterized as “almost like a bye week,’’ insisting, “It’s not a bye week. It was an opportunity for us to be able to have some downtime, for players to recover, if you will.’’
Recover from what is the question. They have gone from shock to defiance to somewhere between resignation and acceptance. At 0-6, their playoff hopes are shot and they all know it. Thankfully, the “Well our division stinks so we’re still in it’’ rhetoric has quieted down. The first order of business is winning a game, if only to change the conversation for a week, and then try to force the spiraling downward arrow back in the vicinity of a positive direction.
“After 0-2, we were kind of like, ‘OK, we got Carolina, let’s go win this one,’ ’’ cornerback Terrell Thomas said. “Crap, we got our ass kicked. Then it was, ‘OK, now we got to play the 4-0 Chiefs,’ and we had a chance in that game and we blew it. Then we had the Eagles right where we wanted them and we blew it. It’s becoming a habit that we need to stop. Until you stop the bleeding yourself, nobody’s going to make it easy on you.’’
Monday’s game promises to be historic — the .090 winning percentage of the Giants and the 1-4 Vikings makes their Week 7 matchup the worst this late in the season in the 44-year history of “Monday Night Football,” according to Elias Sports Bureau.
Vikings defensive end Jared Allen wants his team to “embrace the suck’’ in an attempt to salvage his team’s season. It’s doubtful anything the Giants have done will be embraced Monday night by a fan base that, after this game, will go 20 days before seeing the Giants play again at home. The mood for their most recent game in the Meadowlands was hopeful when the Giants took a quick lead, but spirits darkened during what has become the familiar fourth-quarter fadeout.
There figure to be some empty seats when the Vikings come to town and no one is portraying this event as anything other than what it is: Another game on the schedule for the New York Zombies.