It is fair to do this. 

It is fair to take the bar you set a few weeks ago and raise it higher. This does not make you a phony. It makes you a realist who has his eyes open to what is going on. 

It is fair to raise the bar, and the expectations for the 2022 Giants. Only a fool would take what was anticipated a while back and stay with it now, stubbornly oblivious to the way head coach Brian Daboll’s Resilience Fighters have shredded so many conventional wisdoms for how this was going to go down this season. 

The evidence is all out there. The Giants are 5-1 and it matters not who believes in them and who doesn’t. They are actually underdogs (by 2.5 points) for Sunday’s game against the Jaguars in Jacksonville. The home team is 2-4 and riding a three-game losing streak. The road team has won three straight. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets. 

The Giants are 5-1 and NFL history says they are in a fantastic position to make the playoffs for the first time since 2016 and only the second time since 2011. Since 1990, 113 teams started the season 5-1 and 95 of them made it into the postseason, according to Elias Sports Bureau. That is 84.1 percent. With the playoffs expanded to include 14 teams, the percentage is actually a bit higher for the Giants to make it this season. 

So, there it is. The Giants have been so successful that they succeeded in changing what for them constitutes a good, or great season. Building the program. Changing the culture. Setting a standard. Think of any three-word catch phrase that applies. They are all relevant but the Giants have outgrown them. 

There is always a danger when “should” creeps in, as in “they should win this game” because the Giants are not yet occupying the rarefied airspace of teams with winning pedigrees. They are newbies to all this. Still, the journey ahead is what it is, and what it is is far from daunting. 

At Jacksonville and then at Seattle to face the Seahawks (3-3) before the Week 9 bye. Coming off that one-week get-healthy break, it is home games against the Texans (1-3-1) and Lions (1-4), two of the worst teams the NFL has to offer. The combined record of the next four Giants opponents: 7-14-1. If the Giants win three out of the next four games, they are 8-2 and in prime playoff position heading into the Thanksgiving Day rematch with the Cowboys, the team that handed the Giants their only loss thus far. 

After Dec. 4, there are two games with the crummy Commanders to offset two games with the mighty Eagles. The Giants could win enough before then to not need to run the table on anyone. 

Once again, feel free to sprinkle in any caveats you wish. It is exceedingly difficult to gauge exactly what the Giants are, relative to the other teams with such gaudy records. In the NFC, the Eagles are 6-0 and the Vikings are 5-1. In the AFC it’s the Bills at 5-1. That’s it. 

Daboll said Monday he does not talk to his team about the NFL standings. Some coaches do. He knows his mantra of “our focus is on really what we need to do each week” is “probably not the flashiest of answers but it’s the truth.” He also says this: “One week, really, has nothing to do with the next. It’s a humbling league. You’re one week from falling off a cliff, really.” 

Outside linebacker Oshane Ximines, one of Daboll’s (and defensive coordinator Wink Martindale’s) best reclamation projects, was asked if he could recite the NFC East standings. 

“Um, I mean, I probably could,” he said and then explained why doing so was fruitless. 

“It don’t matter if we don’t take care of business on Sunday,” he said. 

It is easy to say it does not matter merely six weeks into the season. When the Halloween candy is gone and the turkey is carved and consumed, postseason positioning comes into greater focus, whether the Giants want to admit it or not. 

“No I don’t think it will,” countered wide receiver Darius Slayton, another rejuvenated player, like Ximines now in his fourth year with the Giants, “mostly because we have experience ignoring our record, for bad reasons.” 

Slayton laughed at that. 

“Much better to ignore a good [record], I can attest,” he said. 

Daboll’s team is thriving because it has ignored the meager expectations from the outside and he is certainly not going to turn on the faucet to open up a torrent of heightened pressure on his players. It is going to come though. 

When you win, the games get bigger and bigger. The Little Team That Could will morph into The Little Team That Should. Soon enough, Playoffs or Bust could be the new reality for the Giants.