Dan Graziano, senior NFL national reporter 10y

Big Blue Morning: Weekend thoughts

Following three well-deserved days off, the New York Giants return to work today with a short morning practice to knock the cobwebs off. They'll get their regular Tuesday off and then return Wednesday to begin preparing for Sunday's home game against the Falcons. In the meantime, and in the wake of the Giants' Thursday dismantling of Washington, the NFC East had an interesting weekend.

The Eagles went out to San Francisco and suffered their first loss of the season, their banged-up offensive line looking terribly overmatched against the 49ers' defense. And the Cowboys just went out and hammered the Saints at home on Sunday night, getting some measure of revenge for one of their most embarrassing 2013 losses and asserting themselves as a team not to be taken lightly.

As a result, Dallas and Philadelphia are tied for first place at the quarter pole with 3-1 records. The Giants sit just a game behind at 2-2, and Washington is in last at 1-3. The Giants and Eagles are each 1-0 in the division by virtue of wins over Washington. Dallas hasn't played a division game yet.

So, hope? Sure. If you're a Giants fan, no matter how poorly those first two games went, your team is one game behind the first-place tie in the division between two teams it has yet to play. Beats the heck out of last year, when your team was 0-4 at this point and couldn't get in a race no one seemed to want to win. You're perfectly justified in wondering if maybe the NFC East is emerging from his half-decade-long doormat phase, and maybe the Giants have a real shot.

Four games is a decent amount of evidence, but unfortunately it's still not enough to know for sure what's real and what's not. The Giants' offense has looked very smooth these last couple of games, but they've put plenty of bad on tape to go with the good. And the fact that the good is more recent is no guarantee that the bad won't resurface. I retain my preseason questions about whether they have the requisite caliber of personnel to score with the other offenses in the league when they're all at their best, even as I recognize how much better they looked Thursday than a Washington team whose receivers and running backs appear much better than theirs on paper.

There is a long way to go, but if the NFC East is to be the jumble it usually is -- with teams beating up on each other head-to-head and nine or 10 wins being enough to win it -- then this year the Giants should at least be a factor deeper into the season than they were last year. I had them at 8-8 entering the season, which is exactly the record for which they're on pace right now. My game-by-game predictions had them starting W-L-W-L, and instead they've gone L-L-W-W. As beautifully as last week went for them, not even the most die-hard fan can possibly expect them to win all of their remaining games. There will be more tough times to come. That's just the way of things.

And Philadelphia's offensive line will get pieced back together, and Dallas' defense is likely to have some rough games, and Washington is sure to look better at some point than it did Thursday. The rollercoaster rolls on.

But a Tom Coughlin Giants team is always going to win at least as many games as it's supposed to win. And if I'm right that they're an 8-8 team on paper, then my expectation is that Coughlin will get at least eight wins out of them. And if they can steal one or two along the way and get to nine or 10 ... well, then yeah, they're a contender in the NFC East as long as no one runs away with it.

We'll know a lot more after Week 7, by which time the Giants will have played road games in Philadelphia and Dallas and be on their bye. They have that rough Colts-Seahawks-49ers-Cowboys stretch coming out of the bye, and that could sink them if they don't get through these next three weeks in decent shape (say, if they go 1-2 and lose both of the division road games). But given the way they started the season, the Giants like where they sit right now. A 2-2 record at this point doesn't knock them out of anything. And the way they're trending gives them and their fans reason to hope -- at least for a little while -- for another Coughlin/Manning miracle.

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