New York beat Dallas 28-20 on Sunday night, and it wasn't as close as eight points.
The Giants held the ball for 36:40, went 9 of 11 on third down, gained 394 yards to Dallas' 244, and ran it 37 times for 165. Jaxson Dart threw 29 passes and completed 23 of them for three touchdowns and no interceptions. John Harbaugh won his first game as Giants head coach.
It was also an ugly watch in stretches. Nineteen penalties between the two teams for 204 yards, four Giants fumbles, and a Cowboys offense that never found a rhythm.
But the story is what New York got back. Malik Nabers played his first game since tearing his right ACL 350 days ago. Cam Skattebo played his first since breaking his right fibula and dislocating his ankle more than ten months back. Both looked like themselves, and the offense looked like a functioning NFL unit for the first time in a while.
What happened to the Dallas offense
Two hundred and forty-four yards. Twenty-three minutes of possession. Eighteen rushing attempts for 69 yards.
Dak Prescott went 22 of 34 for 175 yards with two touchdowns and an interception before halftime that swung the game. Five point one yards an attempt. Dallas generated 84 air yards on 34 throws.
This was supposed to be one of the better offenses in the league. On Sunday it couldn't stay on the field, couldn't run the ball, and couldn't generate anything downfield. Three dropped passes didn't help.
The good news for anybody holding shares is that the mechanism was mostly clock. Dallas ran 52 plays to New York's 68 because the Giants controlled the game with the run. That's fixable, and a Cowboys offense that gets 65 snaps looks nothing like the one that got 52.
The bad news is that even the plays they did run produced almost nothing through the air.
CeeDee Lamb was fine, everyone else was not
Lamb caught five of his targets for 44 yards and the one-yard touchdown that tied the game in the second quarter. He also drew pass interference penalties that moved the offense. It's not a big line, but it's the line of a receiver still getting his work in a game where the offense ran 52 plays and threw for 175 yards.
George Pickens caught three passes for 28 yards. That's the disappointment. He drew a 38-yard interference penalty on Greg Newsome, which is a real contribution that doesn't show in his line, and then produced almost nothing catchable the rest of the way. He had drops too.
Pickens came into this season being drafted as a top ten or twelve receiver, and he earned that. He was excellent in his first year in Dallas and there's no reason coming into Week 2 to think he's anything other than what the draft market said he was. This was one bad night inside one bad offensive night.
Jake Ferguson was similarly absent. He drew a 19-yard interference call on Dru Phillips, which again is a genuine contribution that gets no credit, but he was otherwise not a factor.
The pattern across all three is worth naming. Dallas' pass catchers drew four defensive pass interference flags and turned very little into actual receptions. Some of that is the Giants playing handsy and getting called for it. Some of it is a passing game that never threatened.
Lamb, Pickens and Ferguson are all fine. What happened Sunday was an offense that ran 52 plays and generated 84 air yards, and nobody produces in that. When Dallas sorts it out they should be scoring in bunches again, and all three of them get paid when that happens.
Javonte Williams is the workhorse, and then he cost them
Williams scored twice, once on a one-yard run in the third quarter and once on a 17-yard reception in the fourth. He's the clear number one back in Dallas, he gets the goal line work, and he catches passes out of the backfield. Both touchdowns on a night the offense managed 20 points came from him.
The carries weren't there because the carries didn't exist. Dallas ran the ball 18 times all night, two of those were Prescott scrambles, and the Cowboys held the ball for 23 minutes. You can't feed a back who never has the ball. Give this offense a normal game and Williams is taking 18 to 22 touches, which is the profile that made him worth drafting.
Nothing about Sunday threatens his role. If anything the usage is encouraging... he was the one Dallas went to inside the five, he was the one Prescott threw to when they needed a score in the fourth, and he converted both. That's the setup for another excellent season.
Then there's the taunting.
On the 17-yard touchdown that pulled Dallas within eight, Williams extended the ball toward a defender as he crossed the goal line and drew a flag. The penalty pushed the extra point back, and Brandon Aubrey missed it.
That matters more than it sounds. Aubrey missing an extra point is close to a once-a-season event. And the eight-point margin meant Dallas needed a touchdown and a two-point conversion the rest of the way instead of a touchdown and a kick. A team that had just clawed back into a one-score game made it harder on itself for no reason at all.
It didn't decide the outcome by itself. It's the kind of thing that decides outcomes, and it's the second mental lapse from a Dallas offense that committed nine penalties for 90 yards.
Cam Skattebo is the hammer again, with a caveat
Eighteen carries for 81 yards and a three-yard touchdown. Four and a half a carry. He also brought back the backflip celebration that got him in trouble over the summer.
Given that he was on the field for the first time since a broken fibula and a dislocated ankle, that's about as good as you could have asked. He ran hard, the Giants leaned on him to close the game out, and New York ground out the fourth quarter behind him against a Dallas front that couldn't handle it.
The fantasy read has a real wrinkle, though. Eighteen carries for 81 yards is a fine day and a modest fantasy day. The touchdown is what turns it from twelve points into eighteen. At 4.5 a carry with limited receiving work, Skattebo's weekly outcome swings almost entirely on whether he finds the end zone, and that's a volatile way to score points.
He's the lead back and the goal line back, so the touchdown equity is real. Just know what you're buying... a back whose good weeks require a score, and whose weeks without one look a lot like Sunday did.
Behind him it's a three-man committee, and a genuinely crowded one. Devin Singletary caught the nine-yard touchdown. Najee Harris signed a one-year minimum deal in August, coming off the torn Achilles that ended his season in Week 3 with the Chargers, and at 6-foot-1 and 242 pounds he fits the physical profile Harbaugh has said he wants in that room. Tyrone Tracy Jr. has topped 1,000 scrimmage yards in each of his first two seasons but slid down the depth chart during the preseason after a fumble and a missed block that put Dart in concussion protocol, then picked up a stinger that had beat writers projecting him inactive for the opener.
Three backs competing for whatever Skattebo doesn't take, on a team that ran it 37 times, is a situation to monitor rather than invest in. None of them is startable while Skattebo is healthy. If he isn't, the question of which one inherits the work is genuinely open, and Harris is the one with the pedigree to take it if the Achilles is behind him.
Malik Nabers is back and getting better
Six catches for 69 yards on nine targets. Team-high target share. The Giants had plays designed for him from the opening drive.
Three hundred and fifty days after a torn ACL, that's an encouraging first look rather than a finished product, and that distinction is the whole point. Nabers isn't all the way back yet and 69 yards says so. What he is, clearly, is the number one option in this offense, and receivers coming off ACL surgery typically get meaningfully better as the season goes and the knee stops being something they think about.
Dart's postgame comment was that no matter the coverage or who they put on him, you have confidence he'll make a play. That's a quarterback who is going to keep throwing it his way.
If the trajectory follows the usual curve, the version of Nabers you see in November is better than the one you watched Sunday, and the one you watched Sunday was already the team's best receiver by a distance. He's a buy if anybody in your league is worried about the yardage.
Isaiah Likely was the story
Eight targets. Eight catches. Seventy-eight yards. Two touchdowns.
He didn't have an incompletion thrown his way all night. He converted two third downs in the first half. He took advantage of a blown coverage in the red zone for the first score and got the second from two yards out.
This is the player Baltimore never quite managed to use. Likely spent his Ravens career as the tantalizing option behind a better-established tight end, flashing in stretches and then disappearing for weeks at a time. In New York he walked into a room with 140 targets vacated by Wan'Dale Robinson's departure and a young quarterback looking for somebody reliable.
The red zone usage is what makes it more than a one-week line. Both touchdowns came inside the 20, and a tight end who is the designated answer down there has a floor that doesn't depend on volume.
If you drafted him, you have something. Eight-for-eight with two scores isn't repeatable every week, but the role behind it looks real, and the competition for targets in that room is thin.
Malachi Fields is the sneaky one
Only three Giants wide receivers caught a pass. Nabers had six, Darnell Mooney had two for 27, and rookie third-rounder Malachi Fields had two for 25.
Fields is a big-bodied outside receiver and he looked like the number three, which in a room this thin is a real role. He's not a Week 2 start and nothing about two catches demands action. But 140 vacated targets have to go somewhere, Mooney isn't going to absorb them all, and a rookie who's already the third option on a team whose quarterback is playing well is the kind of player worth having on a bench in a deeper league.
Watch whether his snap share climbs. If it does, he's a name that matters by midseason.
Jaxson Dart took a step
Twenty-three of 29 for 230 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions, a 134.2 rating. Eleven carries for 54 rushing yards.
The passing efficiency is the eye-catcher, but the thing that showed up on tape was the pace. He looked like a quarterback the game has slowed down for... working through reads, taking what was there, throwing on time. Twenty-nine attempts and 23 completions with zero picks in a division game under the lights is not a small thing for a second-year player.
The rushing is the fantasy multiplier. Fifty-four yards on 11 carries, including designed runs, gives him a floor most quarterbacks don't have and a ceiling that gets interesting when he starts scoring on the ground.
On the injury question, Sunday was actually the encouraging version. Dart mixed in a couple of slides and a dive specifically to avoid the kind of unnecessary contact that defined his rookie year, which suggests the coaching staff has gotten through to him and that he's willing to listen.
That helps. It doesn't solve it, because the risk here isn't really about discipline.
Dart is a fierce competitor and it shows in how he plays. That's most of why he's good, and it's also the thing that can't be coached out of him. It only takes one snap where he puts his head down for an extra yard on third-and-two, or decides he can run through a linebacker instead of around him, and the whole calculation changes. Eleven carries a game gives him eleven chances a week to make that decision, and the instinct that makes him effective in the pocket is the same one that will eventually tell him to lower a shoulder.
So the read is this. Dart has QB1 upside and a rushing floor that makes him startable in weeks where the passing is average. He also carries injury exposure that is baked into his style rather than layered on top of it, which means it doesn't go away as he matures. The sensible move is to carry a startable backup rather than a handcuff you'd have to stream from. That isn't a knock on him. It's the cost of owning a quarterback who plays this way, and the same trait is why you want him in the first place.
Where it leaves both teams
New York looks like a real offense for the first time in years, and the reason is that it has more than one answer. Dart, Skattebo, Nabers and Likely all produced, and the Giants won without needing any one of them to carry it.
Likely is the asset to be most excited about. Nabers is the one most likely to get better. Skattebo is a touchdown-dependent starter. Dart is a QB1 with a contingency plan attached.
Dallas needs to find its offense fast and the mechanism is straightforward... stay on the field, run the ball more than 18 times, and stop giving away 90 yards in penalties. Prescott, Lamb, Pickens, Ferguson and Williams are all good players who had a bad night inside a bad night. Fifty-two plays and 84 air yards is the explanation, and it's the kind of explanation that fixes itself.
The Giants get the Rams on Monday night. Dallas hosts nobody comfortable anytime soon. Week 2 will tell us whether Sunday was a Dallas problem or a New York breakthrough, and it's probably some of both.