The Giants have spent this summer trying to erase the habits that helped drag them into so many slow starts, and John Harbaugh has made clear he isn’t treating any of it like a dress rehearsal.
This week, tight end Isaiah Likely said that “hearing how Giants training camp was in the past was kind of mind-boggling to me.”
Likely arrived in New York this spring after being shaped by Harbaugh’s demanding standard in Baltimore. He described that mindset simply: “If I wake up, I’m putting on cleats,” he said.
What he found with the Giants, he said, was a group that bought into the grind.
“I feel like now everybody’s on the same mantra: If we’re in the building, it’s all ball,” he said.
That’s the kind of buy-in Harbaugh was hired to create. But the real test comes fast. Seven days from now, the Giants open the season against the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football at MetLife Stadium, and that matchup gives Harbaugh a chance to make an immediate statement in the NFC East.
He’s already been locked onto Dallas for a while.
“Really, honestly, I guess the greatest way I could answer that is that we’ve been thinking about Dallas,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t all of a sudden start now.
We’ve been game planning for Dallas and the Rams and the Titans and the Cardinals. Those first four games you kind of look at in terms of your preparation, even during training camp.”
That urgency is a sharp contrast to what came before. The Giants’ previous four camps, as the story goes, were too loose, too comfortable, and too disconnected from the demands of the season.
The results showed up immediately. The Giants have not won a season opener since 2022.
They have not won at home in Week 1 since 2010 against the Carolina Panthers, and they are 0-6 at home in Week 1 since then.
Their recent openers have been ugly, too. They’ve dropped their last three season openers by a combined 89-12 to the Cowboys, Vikings and Commanders. And the last time they hosted Dallas in Week 1 on Sunday Night Football, they were beaten 40-0 in 2023.
Harbaugh hasn’t appeared to center the team’s messaging around the Giants’ long history of trouble against Dallas, even though the numbers are brutal. They are 1-9 in their last 10 meetings with the Cowboys, 2-16 in their last 18 matchups and 3-14 in the 17 games Dak Prescott has started for Dallas.
Corner Greg Newsome II, another spring addition, said he didn’t even know how lopsided the rivalry had been.
“Not really,” Newsome said this week. “Obviously it’s a division game.
I feel like all division games are super important. Going against the Cowboys is super important.
So I’m super excited for the challenge.”
The organization believes Harbaugh is the piece it was missing. And his track record helps explain why.
He went 12-6 in Week 1 during his 18 seasons with the Ravens, including a 5-0 start in season openers from 2008 through 2012, a run that ended with a Super Bowl championship in 2012. Even the two Week 1 losses that closed his Baltimore tenure came against elite opponents - a 27-20 loss to the Chiefs in 2024 and a controversial 41-40 defeat to the Bills in 2025.
From the moment camp opened on July 29 in West Virginia, Harbaugh has talked like a coach who believes the season is won long before September arrives. He said then that the point of practice wasn’t to sort through cuts, but to build toward real football.
“We’re at a stage now, we’re getting ready for the games,” Harbaugh said then. “I mean, that’s what practice is for.
We’re not here to practice. It’s not a training camp exercise.
We’re here to prepare for the games that we’re going to play.”
Newsome said the camp intensity has stood out to him.
“No,” he said. “This is probably one of the tougher camps I’ve been a part of, and I think it’s been great honestly, competing day in and day out, building that callous. I think it’s definitely gonna help us in the long run.”
Harbaugh sounded just as energized after the team pushed through practices heading into the Labor Day weekend break.
“We’re ready to go,” he said Wednesday. “We’re ready to go fight some football battles.”
The Giants’ recent record shows how much work still has to be done. They are 44-104-1, a .295 winning percentage, since the start of the 2017 season, tied with the Jets for the worst regular-season mark in the NFL over that span.
That’s why this isn’t just about sharper practices or a tougher camp. It’s about whether all of that translates when the lights come on.
The Giants are talking differently. They’re practicing differently.
Now they need to play differently.
And if Harbaugh’s approach is going to be fully validated, it starts with results.
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