This is simple.
The Giants absolutely, positively cannot allow Cardinals quarterback Joshua Dobbs to beat them on Sunday at Arizona.
You think the 40-0 shellacking the Cowboys put on the Giants in the season and home opener last Sunday night was an embarrassment?
It can get worse.
It can get worse, starting at 4:05 p.m. Sunday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., where two teams that lost their openers will play, if the Giants don’t take care of business against an inferior team.
The Cardinals, by many accounts around the league, are tanking this season to position themselves for the top pick in the 2024 draft. That is why, while they wait for quarterback Kyler Murray to get healthy after he tore his right ACL last December and subsequently had surgery, the Cardinals are mailing it in with Dobbs, whom they acquired in an Aug. 24 trade with the Browns.
The Giants cannot let Dobbs, a quarterback who will have been on Arizona’s roster for all of 25 days by the time the teams play Sunday, beat them.
They cannot allow a journeyman who’s playing on his sixth different team in seven seasons make them 0-2. They cannot let a quarterback who has played in just nine games since he entered the league with the Steelers in 2017, has started three times and has an 0-3 record, defeat them.
The defense has no other option than to impose its will on Dobbs from the first series and win a game the Giants, who are favored by 5.5 points on the road, are supposed to win.
That means the likes of Dexter Lawrence, Leonard Williams and Kayvon Thibodeaux (Williams and Thibodeaux had zero impact against Dallas) must introduce themselves to Dobbs early and often.
Despite some of the talk-radio chatter this week that has suggested that a Giants win over Arizona needs to be a blowout for it to truly matter, that’s nonsense.
Style points be damned. Just win the damn game. Get to 1-1 and reboot the season with a game next Thursday at the 49ers, who are among the favorites in the NFC to get to the Super Bowl, just four days after the game versus the Cardinals.
Everyone on the Giants, from defensive coordinator Wink Martindale to his players, said all the right things about Dobbs on Thursday. It was an impressive, if earnest, public display of respect.
But Martindale and his players know deep inside that this game is theirs to take, that they should eat this quarterback for an appetizer before moving on to the difficult matchup against the 49ers.
Martindale described Dobbs as “a very smart quarterback that knows where he wants to go with the football. He also said, “He’s mobile enough, too, to still hurt you if you’re taking his reads away from him.’’
Dobbs rushed three times for minus-3 yards last week in a loss at Washington.
“I think there’s a reason why he’s been on so many different teams, because everybody sees the same thing in him,’’ Martindale added.
What exactly is that?
Credit Dobbs for surviving into a seventh NFL season with a sixth different team and still drawing a paycheck. There’s a reason, however, why the 28-year-old Dobbs has never stayed on one team for more than the two seasons he spent with the Steelers (playing in zero games).
If you’re a Giants fan and look at Dobbs as someone the defense should manhandle, you’re not alone.
Even Giants safety Jason Pinnock told The Post on Thursday, “I don’t think it’s unfair’’ to think that way. “But we are in the NFL and anything can happen,’’ he was quick to add.
Asked what he sees in Dobbs on film, Pinnock said: “Confident in his feet, quick reads. They’re trying not to do too much with him right now, so they’re real vanilla with him.’’
While it’s impressive that Dobbs picked up the Cardinals’ system quickly enough to be anointed the starter less than three weeks after he joined the team, he didn’t exactly move the ball up and down the field against the Commanders in the season opener.
Dobbs went 21-for-30 for just 132 yards and the Cardinals produced just 13 first downs. Dobbs was sacked three times, for losses of 18 yards. He fumbled three times, losing two of them.
That should have the Giants’ defensive players salivating like hungry dogs.
The Giants — particularly on defense — need to play the game as if their hair’s on fire. After what they put on tape Sunday night, they should be jumping out of their skin to play this game and right that wrong.
“In the NFL, when you lose, it’s a long week,’’ Pinnock said. “We want to prove to the world that’s not the Giants that [lost] Sunday night. The overall morale of the team, we feel good where we’re at. You cannot let Week 1, when everything went wrong, domino into the year. We’ve got two games in 10 days. We blink and we’re 0-3.’’
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