Giants news, 12/27: Pat Shurmur’s offseason blueprint, more

Good morning, New York Giants fans! Here are your Thursday morning headlines.

Pat Shurmur: “Sort of a blueprint” for offseason

Coach Pat Shurmur will have to shift from weekly game prep mode to offseason mode after Sunday. He has an idea how that, and the entire offseason, will work.

“We’ll have longer conversations with all the players on Monday to talk about what our expectations are moving forward. I’m ready for that. We’ve done this long enough where there’s sort of a blueprint for that,” Shurmur said. “And there’s certain things I expect to see from the younger players, and then I just expect that they’re going to be professional about what they do with their time and take it from there.

“I have a more detailed blueprint of where it’s going to go, I have an idea of what January, February, March needs to look like, but that’s not for anybody to know yet until after we play the next game.”

Michael Thomas: Giants have grown

If the Giants defeat the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday they will finish the second half of their season 5-3.

“We’ve grown, we’ve learned from a lot of mistakes we’ve had. Guys have had a lot of opportunities and we try to take advantage of it,” safety Michael Thomas said. “Obviously we didn’t convert a lot of those games into wins and been in them, competed, but there’s no prize for almost. We got to get better with that, we got to learn how to win, learn how to finish games, but that’s what this last game is for. We’re going to continue to work with each other, continue to go hard, and we’re going to improve, that’s it.”

How hard will Cowboys play?

Dallas, of course, has already clinched the NFC East title.

“We think it’s important to practice well and go play well in a game like this. We’ve been in the situation a couple times in recent years and you have to handle them a little differently based on the availability that you have of your players, but typically, if a player’s not healthy enough to play, he’s not going to play but the other guys are going to play,” Dallas coach Jason Garrett said. “If a guy’s not able to play, it’s a good opportunity to see somebody else, a backup player at that spot; but in general, we want to go practice well and go play well and get ourselves ready for the following week.”

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