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Atlanta Falcons George Asafo-Adjei Buffalo Bills Jersey , 23-20, are once again 1-6, and are closing in on having the first overall pick in the NFL Draft. There was plenty we already knew about the 2018 Giants that was confirmed in this mess of a Monday night game:The third iteration of the rebuilt offenisve line is bad. The Giants have all the firepower they can ask for in Odell Beckham Jr., Sterling Shepard, and Saquon Barkley. They are also utterly incapable of consistently putting it to use. The Giants’ defense is flawed, but tries hard and shouldn’t be blamed for their losing record.However, there were some things that we learned.Eli can still throw down the fieldThe Giants signaled that they were going to be aggressive with their receivers when the first pass of the game was a 10-yard play to Beckham. The Giants were cautious in their use of Saquon Barkley, but finally showed a willingness to challenge a poor secondary with Beckham and Sterling Shepard. Manning completed 71 percent of his passes, finishing with 399 yards passing and a yards per attempt of 10.5, his highest of the season. While the Giants did get good runs after the catch from both Beckham and Shepard, Manning also looked down the field far more than he had against the Eagles. Eli’s game was far from perfect, but it was nice to see him threaten a defense down the field, even in the face of pressure — Something the Giants largely have not done this season. We won’t know whether or not the Giants can sustain I’ve said it before Infant Christopher Slayton Jersey , and I’ll say it again: Eli Manning just looks like a different quarterback when he has the option to attack a defense, rather than just take what it gives him.The Giants can’t play in the red zoneFor all the Giants’ offensive firepower, it shouldn’t really surprise that they are utterly inept in the red zone. The short field that comes with play in the red zone has a bunch of effects on the game. Everything is sped up because offenses simply can’t stretch defenses out they way can between the 20s. Secondaries don’t have to cover as much space, receivers don’t have as much space in which to work, and passing windows are smaller. The red zone is the area of the field in which all the little problems elsewhere on the field rear their heads at once, and the Giants have plenty of them. Slight miscommunications are magnified and being just off-target becomes wildly inaccurate. And small lapses in blocking can become drive-killing mistakes. The Giants routinely do all of these on offense, and it shows in Red Zone play which is just bad. It isn’t as simple as just having a big receiver — Both Sterling Shepard and Odell Beckham are capable of playing far larger than they measure thanks to their quickness and 40-inch vertical leaps. Evan Engram was a premier red zone threat in 2017, but he isn’t used in the same way in this offense.The Giants’ offensive line can’t hold up or create any kind of room for Barkley to run the ball. Poor play calls and miscommunications waste opportunities. The Giants have a lot of little (and some very big) problems which compound and magnify each other, and need to be solved individually before they will have consistent success in the Red Zone.The pass rush might have some lifeThe Giants came in to Monday night with the worst pass rush in the NFL. Granted it was against an offensive line that has done about as good a job of In Olivier Vernon’s second game back, the Giants’ pass rush finally started to show some life.With Olivier Vernon giving the Falcons’ offensive line a legitimate pass rush threat to worry about, the Giants’ other rushers began to find some success, with Kerry Wynn, Lorenzo Carter Christopher Slayton Jersey Draft , Mario Edwards (negated by a defensive holding penalty), all getting to Ryan. James Bettcher also mixed in plenty of schemed pressure with some aggressive blitz calls, which forced Matt Ryan to speed up his process. For the third time this season the Giants’ defense did enough for the team to win. They held an offense which had averaged nearly 30 points a game to 23, and gave the offense opportunity after opportunity to win the game. And once again, the Giants’ offense failed to capitalize. It remains to be seen if the Giants can repeat the defensive feat against the Washington Redskins’ talented offensive line, but for now it was good to see.Pat Shurmur’s bad decisions continueGiants’ head coach Pat Shurmur has made curious, or downright bad, decisions throughout the season.There was consternation regarding Shurmur’s decision to go for 2 points on the team’s first touchdown. That call made sense from a math perspective — best case, the next score would be for the win, worst case it was still a one score game. The move also signaled to his team that he IS trying to win the game, something that his offensive scheme hasn’t always indicated. THAT decision wound up being moot, as the team scored another touchdown and completed a second 2-point conversion attempt. MUCH more egregious, Shurmur called a pair of quarterback sneaks in the final minute with the Giants out of time outs and desperately trying to mount a comeback. Manning took advantage of a bad Falcons offense to get the Giants in scoring position in a flash. But with no timeouts remaining Christopher Slayton NFL Jersey , the Giants had to score, and quickly. Failing that, they needed to get the clock stopped. Instead, the Giants ran a pair of quarterback sneaks with an offensive line that had been utterly dominated all game long. This is on top of the schematic decision to not use Saquon Barkley as a downfield passing threat. Barkley was targeted plenty, 10 times, catching 9. But on those targets, he only got 51 yards, with a long of 14. Shurmur flatly refused to send Barkley down the field in a game where Sterling Shepard had 167 receiving yards and Odell Beckham 143 and a touchdown. With Giants quarterback Eli Manning struggling again, some are suggesting that former Giants coach Ben McAdoo had something positive cooking under that head full of Brylcreem. (And/or something up the sleeve of that giant suit jacket.)Yes, some are saying McAdoo was right last year when he abruptly benched Manning for Geno Smith. The voices making that argument include, you guessed it, current Chargers backup Geno Smith.“Y’all owe my boy Mac an apology,” Smith declared Friday morning on Twitter.It’s not a surprising take Christopher Slayton NFL Draft , but it’s incorrect. McAdoo was not a good head coach. He wasn’t a good head coach in part because he didn’t understand that the job is about much more than Xs and Os. The slicked-back hair and the David Byrne blazer became obvious evidence of a deeper failure to understand the importance of appearances for NFL head coaches.And it’s much more than how a guy combs his hair or wears his clothes. McAdoo never understood the importance of properly selling big decisions, like the sudden benching Manning for a journeyman who had no more of a chance to be part of the solution for the team than I did. McAdoo should have spent time building a clear consensus inside the building. He (or someone else) should have been talking to local and national media members in advance of the move, nudging them toward writing and talking about a benching with the promise of being proven right becoming the lure. He should have been working with team P.R. employees to come up with other ideas for planting the seed that the time had come for Eli to take a back seat, and for getting the fans to get behind it.So while McAdoo may have been right about Eli’s performance, McAdoo was wrong in every way he handled it. He was so wrong that it feels like the new regime may have no choice but to wait for Eli to retire — or to wait for enough of a groundswell to emerge among a fanbase that is willing to keep giving him the benefit of the doubt to reach the conclusion that he needs to go.As an already-lost season continues to unfold, the proof may continue to emerge that Manning needs to make his exit. Maybe he’ll do it on his own. Or maybe the Giants will simply make the decision and live with the consequences.They should have made the decision in the offseason, either by taking a quarterback with the second overall pick in the draft or by signing one of the various free-agent options (Case Keenum thrived under new coach Pat Shurmur in Minnesota) and still taking running back Saquon Barkley at No. 2. But the bungling of the situation by Ben McAdoo last year took that option off the table and forced Shurmur and Dave Gettleman to renew the franchise’s vows with Eli.Now, they have to decide between waiting for Eli to pack up his things and leave, or doing it for him.