A Season-Saving Win: 3 Takeaways From Commanders Dramatic Victory Over Giants

METLIFE STADIUM (East Rutherford, N.J.) — The New York Giants haven’t won the NFC East in 15 years, and they had a golden opportunity to take a big step towards ending that drought on Thursday night.

But then they blew it.

Despite leading the game with less than two minutes to go, they fell apart in crunch time as Jayden Daniels led the Washington Commanders on a late touchdown drive to pull out a dramatic 24-21 victory. They got the game-winning score on a laser pass through traffic from Daniels to Stefon Diggs that became a 32-yard touchdown with 57 seconds remaining.

The Giants had one last chance to pull it out, but J.J. McCarthy’s final pass on a solid night was intercepted.

And just like that, the NFC East looks like it might be a race again. The Giants fell to 5-3-1 on the season, closing the gap between them and the second-place Dallas Cowboys (4-5). And the Commanders, at 3-5-1, now hold the tie-breaker advantage over the Giants and are still in the thick of the race.

Here are my takeaways from the game that tightened this division up:
 

Over the last few weeks, Commanders QB Jayden Daniels has started to round into form, looking a little more like he did two years ago when he was a rookie sensation. That year, he carried a flawed team all the way to the NFC Championship Game.

This team, as hard as it is to believe, is even more flawed. But on Thursday night, he showed he’s capable of carrying them too.

Daniels was a one-man show at times against the Giants, completing 23 of 33 passes for 249 yards, with three touchdowns and two interceptions, and he ran 10 times for 28 yards, too. He kept the Giants’ punch-less defense on its heels with his ability to scramble. And when they left him unpressured in the pocket — all too often — he picked them apart with his arm.

Yeah, he threw two fourth-quarter interceptions, and that wasn’t good. It was also a product of the startling lack of weapons around him. Both passes were force-fed to TE Chig Okonkwo, who has been a disappointment for most of the season. To that point, it was a sign of how few players he had on the field around him who could make and break big plays.

But in the end, WR Stefon Diggs — the only receiver who can make big plays on the Commanders’ active roster — came through. Diggs took a dart pass over the middle between a couple of Giants defenders, blasted free and ran in for the game-winning score. He finished with six catches for 83 yards.

Daniels has no other reliable weapons and no reliable running game and it just doesn’t matter. He’s a weapon all his own. He made it impossible for the Giants pass rush to catch him. He found receivers even when they weren’t open.

And just like he used to do so often as a rookie, Daniels reminded everyone he has the clutch gene and made the big play when it mattered most.

J.J. McCarthy has been mostly outstanding since the Giants acquired him from the Minnesota Vikings. He was terrific, for the most part, again on Thursday night.

But if he wants to make the Giants even think about choosing him over Jaxson Dart as their quarterback next season, he can’t afford to lose too many more games like this.

It wasn’t even about his game-ending interception. That was thrown out of desperation. It had more to do with the fact that even though he completed 22 of 36 passes for 294 yards and ran for 34 more yards, the offense shut down under his direction late in the fourth quarter when they could have put the game away. The Giants gave the Commanders life with two three-and-outs in the final 5.5 minutes.

That just won’t do.

The Giants are thrilled with McCarthy. They love his mobility. They’re enthralled with his arm strength, as he showed in the fourth quarter with a bullet through double coverage to TE Isaiah Likely, which became a go-ahead, 66-yard touchdown pass. He’s doing most of everything they want. 

But he’s got a huge opportunity. The Giants have two 23-year-old potential franchise quarterbacks who will be under contract next season. They are committed to Dart, but they can just as easily change their commitment to McCarthy.

McCarthy will just have to do a lot more than he did on Thursday night to earn it.

The Giants’ top priority at the trade deadline was finding a defensive tackle who could not only help their leaky run defense, but also help them do the one thing they haven’t been able to do consistently since they lost edge rusher Brian Burns early in the season — pressure the quarterback.

Their inability to do that cost them dearly against Daniels on Thursday night, and it’s really going to hurt them as they play better teams and quarterbacks down the stretch and maybe into the postseason.

For most of the game, they couldn’t touch Daniels. Granted, he’s as elusive a quarterback as there is in the league, but the Giants made it easy on him. When he stayed in the pocket, he had plenty of time. When he escaped the pocket, it wasn’t because he was rushed, and there was nobody containing him on the outside.

As a result, he picked them apart with his arm, after picking them apart with his legs in a 27-27 tie last month.

The Giants rank near the bottom in the NFL with 17 sacks. They came into this game with a league-worst pressure rate of 18.9%. They’ve got Trevor Lawrence (Jacksonville), Brock Purdy (San Francisco), Jared Goff (Detroit) and Dak Prescott (Dallas) coming up over their next seven games.

It’s great that they’re opportunistic. They have a very strong secondary. And they had two more interceptions on Thursday night.

But the defense is really going to have to dial up the pressure against some of the NFL’s best quarterbacks to have a chance to survive.

It’s hard to overstate how much the Giants needed to pad their lead in the NFC East race on Thursday night, because this game marked the end point of the easy part of their schedule.

Up next for them is a minefield of the NFL’s elite, starting with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 10 days. And they’ll also face the San Francisco 49ers, the Seattle Seahawks, the Cleveland Browns and the Detroit Lions over the next seven weeks.

They are not quite in that class yet. And that could be a problem with the Cowboys now nipping at their heels.

As for the Commanders, they now have new life in the division race. They have a tough game against the Cincinnati Bengals when they return, but after that they have a very winnable two-game road trip to Arizona and Tennessee, where they’ll face two of the worst teams in the league.

That is a huge opportunity for them to make up some lost ground, and maybe really get into the thick of the race by the time they get to December.