KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tom Coughlin was positive when he addressed his 0-4 Giants, because it does no good to beat a dead horse.
The only solace he could find was his players tried like Giants on yet another day when they did not play like Giants.
“I did think that the effort was good. … I thought they played hard. … They came and they wanted it. … They sustained it pretty much the whole ballgame, I think,” Coughlin said after Chiefs 31, Giants 7. “So with that, it was an improvement over last week.”
At 0-4, however, something is terribly wrong. Coughlin hasn’t all of a sudden forgotten how to coach. But something needs to change. Or maybe the Giants are simply a bad team with too many overrated or complacent players.
Coughlin was asked: “Where do you go from here?”
“Keep trying. What do you mean, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” he said. “You go back, and take a look at the tape, you look at the next opponent, come together, we try to plan again, we go back to work. What else is there for us to do? Go back to work and see if you can make something happen that allows us to be more competitive, to play a second half of a game, rather than one half. To play four quarters, to put some points on the board and give our defense a chance to regroup rather than send them back out there every three plays. That’s what we can do.”
You can’t fault Eli Manning for looking skittish in the pocket behind this offensive line.
“There were some times when the play call was a down-the-field throw that he couldn’t hang in there quite long enough to accomplish that particular play,” Coughlin said. “And sometimes that’s down and distance and there’s really not a lot you can do with regard to that.”
The Giants have been outscored 69-7 these last two weeks. It would have been 69-10 if Josh Brown hadn’t hooked a 44-yard field goal at the end of a poorly managed first half. The offense is an absolute mess, and as hard as the defense played, Alex Smith attempted 41 passes and was sacked once — by Spencer Paysinger. Jason Pierre-Paul thought this would be the game he would break out. He thought wrong.
Coughlin won the coin toss and elected to defer. Manning went three-and-out on the opening drive of the second half.
“Our inability to do anything with the ball in the second half. There’s no excuse for it. That’s poor, that’s extremely poor,” Coughlin said.
Coughlin is 3-9 in his last 12 games. He has lost his last seven road games. Over the last five road games, the Giants have been outscored 172-52.
“I’m depending heavily on the leadership and depending heavily on the character of the guys in that locker room,” Coughlin said. “I’ll take the lead in trying to do the best I can to make sure that, yeah, there’s nothing I can do about tomorrow, we have to talk about the game, but come Wednesday, we’ll give them some information I think will help them to prepare for the next opponent.”