Giants’ Week 1 Win Should Be a Lesson to Teams That Are Growing Stagnant

Admit it, even for the most pleasantly and purposefully delusional Giants fan, there have been enough hard realities to break up the John Harbaugh fever dream. Cam Skattebo frog-splashing and back-flipping on a previously shattered ankle. Jaxson Dart making long-term reservations in the medical tent. Dexter Lawrence II being shipped off to Cincinnati. The frequently lambasted Matt Nagy and Greg Roman-a coordinator minotaur that, for some, would conjure visions of a slightly more noisome Jason Garrett-coming together to forge an offense from no schematic common ground. And Odell Beckham Jr. making a heroic return to fill out a necessary roster spot with half the recommended number of ACLs for a regular human.

Read more BOJ executive saw need for vigilance to ‘non-linear’ inflation spikes

And yet, against a division rival that had owned the prime-time season-opener matchup against the Giants for more than a decade, the John Harbaugh–led team looked almost exactly the way we would have imagined if we were somehow magically unable to dream up worst-case scenarios. Physical. Largely unafraid. Inventive. One of the best third-down offenses of this millennium. A football team that did not depend, in any meaningful way, on Russell Wilson for a boost.

It is often disastrous to draw any long-term conclusions out of a one-week sample size, but after watching the way the Giants behaved under a coach who just one year ago was in the midst of a long-term plank walk, and watching Sunday’s 28–20 win over the alleged Super Bowl–aspiring Cowboys, it’s difficult to support the continued push for owner pragmatism when it comes to fledgling coaches. Oftentimes, when something appears broken, it’s merely the inability of whomever is in charge to look at the situation from a fresh perspective. That doesn’t change when the end of a person’s paycheck is threatened, the budget tightens, free agents treat the location as if it were radioactive and the fan base starts openly courting your replacement before the availability of most pumpkin spice products.

John Harbaugh celebrates his first win as Giants head coach

(via @NFL) pic.twitter.com/vUUaIQVLXx

– Sports Illustrated (@SInow) September 14, 2026

It’s odd to point this out in New York of all places, where Tom Coughlin had so many times been offered up as a human sacrifice for the team’s shortcomings. Players wanted him gone before he agreed to drop (some of) the General Patton stuff. Fans wanted him gone before, during and immediately after both Super Bowl wins. He is the modern poster child for why teams give coaches extra time, even when it gets incredibly uncomfortable. But he may have also been an aberration.

At least it feels that way, on a Sunday where the Ravens’ new head coach Jesse Minter turned Harbaugh’s former team into a vicious, toothy defense that made playing behind the sticks nearly impossible and Baltimore’s new offensive coordinator made Zay Flowers a scheme-transcendent chess piece like we’d never seen. A Sunday when Ben Johnson is hanging 59 a little more than a year after taking over a Bears team that had painfully clung on to a head coach that was clearly on life support and, on the flip side, the Buccaneers are turning a football game over and the Packers are failing to close out a game in the fourth quarter. Here is a living, breathing glimpse of what change offers and what stagnation costs.

Certainly, not all teams that make changes experience the same theatrical one-game bounce, especially this weekend. The Steelers, under new coach Mike McCarthy, and the Falcons, under new coach Kevin Stefanski, played against each other in one of the least exciting offensive football games in NFL history. Seriously. According to SumerSports, it was third percentile bad, ranking 1,069th out of the 1,097 games the statistical site has cataloged. The new-era OC Mike McDaniel Chargers-much like the old Chargers, but with Aviators-fell apart without receiver Ladd McConkey on the field and looked as scattered on the offensive line as it did a season ago without its top two tackles. Todd Monken, after 60 minutes of Browns football, has already had to discuss the possibility of firing himself at a podium.

Read more EA FC 27 Early Access Release Time: What Time Can You Start Playing?

Here’s a look at our winners and losers from Sunday’s Week 1 action https://t.co/08FXYzHBN6pic.twitter.com/ClenXCziuY

– Sports Illustrated (@SInow) September 14, 2026

But with most coaches making between the salary of a decent tight end and a bad bridge starting quarterback, and none of it counting against the salary cap, it is the true market inefficiency that some teams wait far too long to exploit due to some twisted cocktail of misplaced loyalty, laziness and/or penny-pinching. The Colts, for example, still have the same general manager a season after the team released a statement that the GM had better start winning games … or else. This is especially true coming up on a season in which there will be at least three young offensive coaches-the Ravens’ Declan Doyle, Jaguars’ Grant Udinski and Rams’ Nathan Scheelhaase-with legitimate promise of growing into the shoes of Sean McVay, Ben Johnson, Liam Coen, Kevin O’Connell, Kyle Shanahan and some of the other consistently great play-callers around the NFL. Even upgrading to Mike LaFleur as head coach gave the historically uninteresting Cardinals one of its most important and surprising regular-season wins of the past half-decade.

It’s true that if the Giants had not waited to fire Brian Daboll, then Harbaugh wouldn’t have been available. But the point-that Harbaugh’s old team looks better without him and his new team looks unrecognizable with him-simply sheds light on what happens when someone can look at the fever dream version of the team without bearing its previous scars, and how difficult that is to do if a troubled head coach remains in the building. Under Harbaugh, the Giants don’t have to spiral with a lead anymore. They can run, essentially, the same exact play four times in a row and gain yardage every time instead of being made fun of for it (that happened, by the way). They can exist in a market that strips everyone bare of their hubris and not feel so perforated.

Unlike players, whose development is conditional on myriad factors, it feels pretty obvious when a coach comes around and is capable of changing something; of making dreams turn to reality. The Giants have, after many attempts at trial and error, after being accused of holding on too long and not nearly enough, finally woken up and realized they don’t have to pinch themselves anymore.

This article was originally published on www.si.com as Giants’ Week 1 Win Should Be a Lesson to Teams That Are Growing Stagnant.

Copyright ABG-SI LLC. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read more Packers TE Tucker Kraft Shares Fiery Response After Epic Fourth-Quarter Collapse vs. Vikings