The Giants spent two days practicing with the Bengals this week, but it didn’t seem to do much to help them figure out how to get anything past the Bengals on Friday night.
Andy Dalton took the Bengals 52 yards on six plays on Cincinnati’s first possession of the game and capped the drive with a three-yard touchdown pass to Mohamed Sanu. That ended Dalton’s night with three completions in three tries for 31 yards against the Giants starting defense.
That defense lost one of its newest members when rookie safety Landon Collins left the game with a knee injury. There’s no indication of the severity at the moment, but the Giants lost Mykele Thompson, another rookie safety, to an Achilles injury that called for a cart to take him to the locker room. That doesn’t bode well for the fifth-round pick and any absence for Collins will require the Giants to look outside the organization to bolster an already thin spot on the roster.
Those issues would be big ones for the Giants, but they may be masked in the short term by the inability of the starting offense to move the ball against either the first- or second-string Cincinnati defenders. Eli Manning ran four drives with the offense and picked up just one first down and gaining 38 yards on 14 plays.
The Bengals will likely be pleased with the work of their first teams, allowing them plenty of time to analyze the players fighting for spots on the back end of the roster.
Giants fans, on the other hand, won’t like that performance one bit and the fact that Tom Coughlin ran his starters out four times in the first week of preseason tells you he didn’t like it either.
UPDATE 9:25 p.m. ET: The Giants say x-rays on Collins’s knee were negative, but he may be in for further evaluation once the team returns to New Jersey.