The 49ers are good, damn good. They made the Steelers look like a Pop Warner team — in Pittsburgh, no less — in Week 1. They took their archrival Rams’ very best shot in Week 2, still walked away with a win. They are loaded with talent at the skill positions, all over the field, both sides of the ball. Their quarterback has yet to lose a regular-season game.
Did we mention it’s their home opener?
It’s their home opener.
The Giants? The Giants are 1-1 and damned happy to be that. They surrendered 60 unanswered points to start the season. There is no such thing as treating wins in the NFL like undersized trout in a stream — no throwing any of them back — but they needed to pull out all the stops last week just to beat the Cardinals, who are a team that has “2-14” written all over them, who have probably already started sizing jerseys for Caleb Williams.
Did we mention that the Giants are banged up?
The Giants are banged up. They will be missing four starters, chief among them Saquon Barkley, nursing a banged-up ankle.
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There are reasons why the Giants are double-digit underdogs for their annual Thursday night showcase at Levi’s Stadium, where probably 67,500 of the 68,500 folks in the stands will be there for a homecoming for a team that sure looks worthy of a sixth franchise Lombardi Trophy. And the Giants sure look like a quintessential Homecoming Game foe.
Know what, though?
The Giants are going to show up anyway.
“Whether it’s early or in the middle part of the season, all you’re trying to do is improve,” Giants coach Brian Daboll said earlier in the week in Tempe, Ariz., where the Giants opted to stay headquartered before flying to the Bay Area Wednesday. “There’s plenty of things we can improve on, and you go from week-to-week.
“The biggest thing is you come in, you make corrections. There’s good things, there’s things you need to work on and then you try to have a good week. That’s how we approach it. It’s not a holistic view of two games and this is what happened in the first and this is what happened in the second. It’s just really about the mindset of improving every day for everybody in the organization.”
And if we’ve learned anything from Daboll’s first 21 games as a head coach, he is forever working his room, forever working his players, forever building them up so they believe they belong on the same field with anybody.
Sometimes that doesn’t matter — over a period of 10 straight quarters linking last year’s Eagles playoff game and the first game and a half this year the Giants were outscored 98-7 — but that doesn’t shake Daboll’s belief in his players. And vice versa. You can’t mention that 98-7 figure without countering with 31-8 — the number which allowed the Giants to escape Sunday three points clear of the Cardinals.
The short week probably doesn’t help the Giants at all — “So, it’s really walk-through/jog-through. You’ve got to prepare hard in the meetings, and you got to treat those lighter practices with great detail and attention to the specifics of what we need to get accomplished,” Daboll said — and it may hurt the 49ers as well if Brandon Aiyuk, listed as questionable, can’t go.
For the Giants, the formula is simple in spirit and harder in practice.
- Keep the ball away from the 49ers as long as possible. If ever a game screamed for the blueprint from Super Bowl XXV, this one does.
- Make life miserable for Brock Purdy. Maybe he’s just destined to be perfect forever. More likely, some defense is going to make life miserable for him, the way the Eagles did in the playoffs. Can the Giants do that, especially on a short week?
“It’s a quick turnaround,” Daboll said, “but everybody has to play them, so that’s what we will do.”
And they’ll show up, eager to put in a full day’s work. That much you can take to the bank.