There are two ways this thing can go.
After four straight losses to open the season, including two in a row on walk-off field goals, any fragment of a sliver of a thread of hope of this being a successful year now hangs in the balance against the equally winless and equally unfortunate Chargers on Sunday.
But when a team gets to this point, it's not all about fixing X's and O's, adjusting game plans, and making personnel decisions. Sometimes, when teams are sinking fast like the Giants are right now, the biggest struggle is just to keep everybody from jumping ship.
That's the challenge now for this team: Finding a way to stick together. The rest of the season can play out with dignity or dysfunction. It's up to the players to decide which.
"It's fight or flight time," Ben McAdoo said on a Monday conference call. "We have talented men of integrity in the locker room. It's not going to be easy. But we have to go out there and fight. I expect us to fight."
McAdoo said his greatest concern is players "going numb."
"You have to fight through it and you have to work for that first one, for the first win," he said. "We can never accept this."
That's easier to say than to do, although it can be done. In 2013, when the Giants started their season with six straight losses, the locker room easily could have splintered. Instead, the team was held together by the sheer willpower of strong leaders such as Antrel Rolle and Tom Coughlin. They refused to allow anyone to even eye the lifeboats.
Now, four years later, that calling falls on a new generation of Giants leaders with McAdoo, who has never been in such a predicament, in charge. They need to find the right message, and do it quickly.
"I think the mood is in a strange spot," running back Shane Vereen said about the temperature of the team in his weekly radio appearance on WFAN on Monday. "We know the season has its ups and downs, but unfortunately ours hasn't even had its ups yet."
"It's hard to go ahead and say 'Hey guys, keep playing, we're gonna get one!' when you've dropped the first four," defensive captain Jonathan Casillas said on Sunday. "It's putting us in a real tough spot to do anything. We have to be able to take a step back and look ourselves in the mirror and see what we're doing wrong, see what we can do better."
There is a lot.
The Giants are struggling in all aspects of the game, and for the second straight week all three elements of what McAdoo calls "complementary football" failed them. It had led to historic heartbreak, too. The Giants are only the third team in NFL history to lose back-to-back games on the final play of the fourth quarter, a feat of frustration accomplished by the 1984 Browns and the 2006 Eagles.
"We're 0-4 and our film verifies it," McAdoo said of the mistake-riddled performances. "It starts with blocking, tackling, catching the football, kicking and punting, and especially in the fourth quarter."
It is wearing on them.
"Nobody likes to lose and for us to be a month into the season, four weeks, with no wins, it's very, very, very frustrating," Casillas said. "It's getting old, that's for sure."
Eli Manning was on that 2013 team, and offered some public advice to teammates after the game on Sunday.
"You just keep fighting," Manning said. "You keep fighting for a win and that's all you do every week. Each week the record doesn't matter, you just want that feeling. You want that feeling after the game that you did something, that you earned the win, that your preparation was good and that you came together as a team.
"We need it, we want it," he said, "but nothing is going to be given to us."
