Cowboys show how far away NY Giants are from relevancy in 21-6 loss | Takeaways

The NY Giants, as the Dallas Cowboys showed during a 21-6 loss Sunday afternoon at MetLife Stadium, are a dysfunctional mess 

At halftime of Fox’s broadcast of Sunday’s NY Giants vs. Dallas Cowboys game, Michael Strahan offered a biting yet painfully accurate description of his former team.

“If you want to get your team right, play the Giants,” Strahan lamented.

Strahan is absolutely right.

Following Sunday’s uninspiring and largely uneventful 21-6 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, the NY Giants fell to 4-10, officially missing the postseason for the ninth time in the ten seasons since Strahan helped lead a Giants victory in Super Bowl XLVI.

Despite Ezekiel Elliott and Tony Pollard playing through nagging injuries, the Cowboys rushed for 126 yards against the NY Giants.

Dak Prescott completed 28-of-37 passes for 217 yards and a touchdown, offering up a subpar effort by the Cowboys’ quarterback’s standards.

While the NY Giants held the Cowboys to three first-half field goals, New York also turned it over three times.

One of the teams on the field at MetLife Stadium has a legitimate chance to compete for a Super Bowl this season and needed far from its best effort to win. The other, might not have three foundational centerpieces on the roster.

Care to guess which team was which?

These are dark times in East Rutherford, for a franchise that is a shell of what it was in Strahan’s prime, and before. Sunday’s game showed just how far away the NY Giants are from competing on a day where the Cowboys seemed to expend little effort to make a victory look so effortless.

Here are three key takeaways from Sunday’s NY Giants loss to the Dallas Cowboys:

At this point, the NY Giants aren’t even functional

It’s almost impossible to assess blame for the depths the NY Giants have fallen to this season.

Coaching certainly plays a role. So, too, does play-calling.

But the inability to involve players who were expected to be playmakers has been a critical component to this season rapidly unraveling.

Through the first three quarters on Sunday, if you’re reading this, you had as many receptions as Kenny Golladay and Sterling Shepard. Darius Slayton caught just one pass through the first three quarters, for nine yards, and was targeted only twice.

It is wholly unacceptable in the modern NFL for a team’s top three receivers to produce one reception for nine yards.

Be it subpar quarterback play, after all Mike Glennon completed just 13-of-24 passes for 9 yards with three interceptions [before being pulled for Jake Fromm with 4:16 remaining], or conservative game-plan, or terrible effort and execution, it’s impossible to win this way.

Which is probably why the NY Giants are 4-10 and have won just once since Thanksgiving …