Giants drift further away from relevance with ugly loss to 49ers

Relevance.

This is all Giants co-owner John Mara has been asking of his team for the better part of the last decade.

Remain playoff relevant into December.

It’s not a lot to ask, really.

Sunday’s game against the 49ers at MetLife Stadium represented a tipping point in that race to remain relevant.

By day’s end, though, the Giants drifted further away from relevance, losing 34-24 to the 49ers to fall to 2-7, the second-worst record in the NFL.

In front of a home crowd that was close to 50 percent vociferous 49ers fans, the Giants were seeking their third consecutive win at MetLife, where they went 1-8 last season.

San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan, with the only fans remaining in the building wearing red and gold, even removed quarterback Mac Jones in the final seconds to allow him a curtain call.

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“That … was interesting,” Giants rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart said of the heavy 49ers fan presence. “I’ve never played at a home game where I felt like it was kind of lopsided in that department.”

This, of course, is what happens to home teams when they post a losing record in eight of nine seasons.

“I hate this s–t,” Giants receiver Wan’Dale Robinson, in his fourth year of this malaise, said after the game of the broken-record losing trend.

Sure, the Giants were shorthanded, with three quarters of their starting secondary out with injury, dynamic rookie running back Cam Skattebo out for the season and a mediocre receiving corps simply incapable of keeping a defense honest.

But the Giants had their chances.

Exhibit A: After a sack and forced fumble by edge rusher Brian Burns deep in San Francisco territory late in the first half, the Giants failed to convert merely a field goal out of the turnover and trudged into halftime trailing 17-7 instead of 17-14 or, at worst, 17-10.

But a Graham Gano missed 45-yard field goal left the score at 17-7 at the intermission and the Giants looking defeated with an entire half of football still to play.

“We’ve got to be able to not just let things collapse,” Dart said. “We have to have the intensity and the focus as a whole team to weather the adversity storms and keep the belief that we’re going to win. I think at times we just let a few things lead to another.”

Giants head coach Brian Daboll called out the “great play” by Burns and said of the missed field goal, “I don’t want to say that was a [game] breaker … but you’d love to have points down there and we didn’t get it done.”

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Dart, when that field goal missed, looked physically ill on the sideline.

“In those situations, you have to get points,” he said. “It’s definitely a sour taste, but we’ve got to be able to come out in the second half and respond better.”

They didn’t.

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The 49ers scored 10 points on two of their first three second-half possessions to go up 27-10 and the Giants were on the back foot the rest of the game.

This after the Giants looked so promising to start the game, taking a 7-0 lead on a 15-yard Dart scoring pass to tight end Theo Johnson.

That, however, is where success began and ended for the Giants in the half. They went 64 yards on 10 plays on that scoring series and proceeded to gain just 34 yards on 17 plays the rest of the half and trailed 17-7 at the intermission.

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The 49ers answered that Giants score with a 5-yard touchdown pass from Jones (19 of 24, 235 yards, 2 TDs) to running back Christian McCaffrey (28 carries, 106 yards with a TD with five catches for 67 yards and a TD) to tie the game at 7-7.

The 49ers made it 14-7 on an 11-yard Jones scoring pass to receiver Jauan Jennings with 13:08 remaining in the half.

San Francisco took a 17-7 lead on a 54-yard field goal by Eddy Pineiro with 1:55 remaining in the half.

That’s when the worst moment of the game took place on the Giants’ final possession of the first half: the failure to capitalize on the Burns strip-sack, giving the Giants possession at the San Francisco 27-yard line with 31 seconds remaining in the half.

Their offense went three plays without gaining a yard and then Gano pulled the 45-yard field-goal attempt wide left with 15 seconds remaining.

When the field goal failed, Burns dropped to the Giants bench in disbelief.

It was Gano’s first miss of the season and it resulted in the Giants being booed off the field on their way to the locker room.

Before the game, there was another hired plane circling the skies over MetLife Stadium with a banner reading, “MR. MARA ENOUGH IS ENOUGH — CLEAN HOUSE.’’

These are difficult times for the Giants — even with the legitimate promise of Dart’s ascent.

But yet again, relevance, as it has for eight of the past nine seasons, has slipped from the Giants’ grasp long before December.

Through nine games, the Giants have been 2-7 six times in the past nine years, 1-8 once and 3-6 once. The only outlier was their 7-2 start en route to the playoffs in 2022, Daboll’s first year.

And that feels like generations ago.