This time of year, when little of consequence is happening in the NFL that we on the outside can see, reporters, analysts, and fans are nonetheless trying to gauge the prospects of teams for the upcoming season. Russell Wilson seems to be exciting Jalin Hyatt and Darius Slayton with his penchant for the deep ball. Abdul Carter looks like the real deal. Jaxson Dart has been uneven but Brian Daboll seems excited about his progress. Maybe Evan Neal can be salvaged by a move to guard.

It’s mostly futile, though. Even the preseason games don’t tell us much. In 2023, the Giants lost their first preseason game by five points to a Detroit team that just barely fell short of reaching the Super Bowl. They barely beat a Carolina team that went 2-15. They lost a chippy game to the new, supposedly contending, Aaron Rodgers-led Jets whose highlight was Tyrod Taylor trying to hit Jalin Hyatt on a couple of deep routes against Sauce Gardner. Did anyone see the 40-0 skunking by Dallas on opening night and the subsequent disastrous season that followed? I didn’t.

This raises the question: How long will it be before we know whether this Giants team is any good, or whether 2025 will just be more of the same disappointment? As fans, we are prone to over-interpreting the result of the opening game. When it’s as bad as that 2023 Dallas opener it’s hard not to, and last year’s Minnesota opener was not far behind. Usually, though, it takes a little while to get the pulse of a team.

How long? Maybe a month or so is enough. Let’s look at several notable (good or bad) Giants teams from the past, as well as a couple of notable individual seasons of other teams. Instead of just win-loss record, which can be deceiving if games are close, let’s look at points scored and given up, and how those vary throughout a game, which may give us a feel for just how good a team’s play is, whether they are front runners or come-from-behind specialists, etc. As we’ll see, the first month or so has usually been good enough to rule in or out the team being awful. It’s often been good enough to identify the most dominant Giants teams, with one exception – the effect that an unforeseen serious injury can have on a team’s chances. It can differentiate front runners from comeback kids. It cannot predict miracles, of which there have been several in Giants’ history.

Here are the composite cumulative point differentials by quarter over the first month of the season for each team:

The four columns represent the point differential summed over the first four games at the end of the first, second, third, and fourth quarters. I’ve chosen specific Giants seasons of interest: The four Super Bowl-winning seasons (1986, 1990, 2007, 2011), the one Super Bowl loss season (2000), two seasons that marked the turnaround of the Giants’ fortunes after previous losing stretches (1984, 2005), the disappointing post-Super Bowl 2008 season, and the three Brian Daboll seasons. I’ve also included two seasons of other teams as comparisons: The 2007 New England Patriots and the 2022 Detroit Lions.

Let’s start with the 2007 Patriots as the benchmark for every other team. That spread offense with extensive use of the shotgun and a slot receiver revolutionized the NFL, and teams couldn’t figure out how to deal with it…until Steve Spagnuolo in the Super Bowl. Through the first month and beyond, though, the Patriots terrorized opposing defenses, and you can see it in their quarter-by-quarter splits for the first four games. On average, up by about a touchdown after one quarter, two touchdowns at the half, three touchdowns after three quarters, and four touchdowns by the game’s end. It was pretty obvious by the end of September that that team was one to reckon with.

The Giants have had four Super Bowl winners. The only one of them that was truly impressive was the 1990 team, which won its first 10 games, finished 14-2, and won the post-season with their backup quarterback (albeit a good one). You could see that that team would be really good by their quarter-by-quarter point differentials for the first month of the season, grabbing first-quarter leads and then building on them throughout the game. Not as impressive as the 2007 Patriots, to be sure, but those first four wins were by an average of a bit more than two touchdowns. The 1990 team finished the regular season with a +124 point differential, the third highest in Giants’ history during the Super Bowl era.

The other Super Bowl-winning Giants teams were far from dominant…at least for a while. The 1986 team also went 14-2, but through Week 13 nine of their 11 wins were by a touchdown or less. You can see from the chart that on average that team was outscored in the first half through the first month. After Week 13, though, they won by 10, 20, and 31 to close out the regular season with a +135 point differential, the best of any Giants team in the Super Bowl era. Then they won their playoff games by 46, 17, and 19 points. So it’s possible, though not common, for a team to change the script in mid-season. Maybe it’s not random, though. The last of those close wins, in Week 13, was the Monday Night Football game in which they trailed the 49ers 17-0 and came back to win. Maybe this play was the spark:

And that’s the thing that can’t be measured – moments that change the psychology of a team for better or worse.

The 2007 Super Bowl winners were somewhat similar. They got off to an awful 0-2 start, were lucky not to be 0-3, and still had a negative cumulative point differential at the end of every quarter through Game 4. They righted the ship after that, but then were trounced by Minnesota 41-17 in Week 12, and with a playoff berth staring them in the faces in Week 15 they lost badly at home to Washington – and lost Jeremy Shockey to injury to boot. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter in Buffalo the next week that they finally woke up and clinched a playoff spot, the following week they came close to giving New England its first loss, and the rest was history… a history that no one on the outside saw coming.

The 2011 champions had some similarities as well. You can see from the chart that they were somewhat better at the start of the season than the 2007 team, but it was because of their offense. That team’s defense was suspect, giving up 36, 49, 38, and 34 points in games along the way as they went from 3-1 to 7-6. Once again, with the playoffs in sight, they laid an egg against Washington at home, and were it not for Victor Cruz’ heroics against the Jets, they might not have made the playoffs. Somehow the defense tightened up after that, not allowing more than 20 points in a game the rest of the way.

Then we have the 2008 Giants. Look at those quarter-by-quarter margins through the first month. Not as good as the 2007 Patriots, but not far off. It looked as if that team, buoyed by their upset victory over New England, had arrived and was going to dominate the NFL. (I thought that, anyway.) It looked like the best Giants team since 1990, and indeed it finished the season with a +133 point differential, second highest of any Giants team in the Super Bowl era. Then the Plaxico Burress self-inflicted wound happened, and things came crashing down. They were 10-1 when it happened, and managed to win the next week without him. But they limped to the playoffs, losing three of their last four, and were bounced out in one game. It turned out that the dominant quarter-by-quarter score margins were subject to a single point failure.

The 2000 Super Bowl Giants finished 12-4, but when you break down their games, they were front-runners, often jumping out to first or second quarter leads and sitting on them. You can see that in their first month with an almost constant positive point differential for all four quarters. It worked against the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game, but when that offense was unable to score in the first half against the Ravens in the Super Bowl, it was clear I think to many of us that they were in trouble.

I doubt this year’s Giants are going to the Super Bowl. We can at least look, though, for signs that things may be turning around for them. In that sense the 1984 and 2005 seasons are instructive. Both of those teams made the playoffs after several years of losing, both started off 3-1, and both teams had positive point differentials in every quarter through the first month of games.

That’s the type of thing Giants fans should be looking for when the 2025 season begins. And that’s what hasn’t happened enough during the Brian Daboll era:

• The first month of 2023 was one of the worst starts in Giants history. Their first month quarterly point differentials were almost like those of the 2007 Patriots except with a minus sign. That team did manage to turn it around a bit in the second half of the season, especially once the offensive line stabilized but partly because Tyrod Taylor and Tommy DeVito played better than Daniel Jones.
• The 2024 team only won three games, but you can argue (well, maybe not you, but I’ll argue) from the quarterly point margins that it was a better team – that team at least hung around in the first half of many of their games but couldn’t close the deal in the fourth quarter (e.g., the Washington, Dallas, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Carolina, New Orleans games).
• Compare those to the opportunistic 2022 team – that team’s quarterly point differentials were close to zero through the first month, and that was true of most of the season. They hung around and found a way to win in the fourth quarter a lot of the time.

What we should be looking for is a team that hangs around and finds a way to win some of the time, especially against a good opponent. In 2005, there were still doubts about Eli Manning even through that first month of the season when they were mostly outscoring their opponents. In the next game, though, he hit Jeremy Shockey with a 24-yard TD pass to get the Giants to OT vs. Dallas (a game which they eventually lost), and then the next week, he beat undefeated Denver with his TD pass at :08 to Amani Toomer:

If a memorable play like that doesn’t happen this season, and if the Giants don’t get off to a good start in 2025, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all is lost – that’s why I included the 2022 Detroit Lions in the chart. That team started the season 1-6, but the chart shows that in general they were playing close games just like the 2022 Giants were. Finally things started to click for those Lions, and while their eventual 9-8 finish barely left them out of the playoffs, they have been one of the NFL’s serious contenders the past two years.

The 2025 season starts with Washington, Dallas, Kansas City, and the Chargers. It’s not easy. I don’t expect 3-1. If they find one or two wins and keep the other ones close, then this might become an interesting season. If they don’t, Brian Daboll may be available for work.