Post-game quotebook: What the Giants were saying after 27-21 loss to Cardinals

The New York Giants fell to the Arizona Cardinals 27-21 at home Sunday afternoon. Let’s go inside the locker room and find out what players were saying.

Golden Tate on the offense scoring just 14 points against a below-average Cardinals defense:

“That’s very frustrating. I mean, we made those guys look like the ’85 Bears.

“We had a great scheme, we just did not execute... I’m going to probably say it for the rest of the year and my entire time, we don’t need to be the best team in the league, we just need to be better than the team we were going against and today we just absolutely weren’t.”

Golden Tate on how the loss felt after the game:

“Very disappointing. People spend their hard-earned money to sit in the rain and watch us do that; it’s just unacceptable. I think, from top to bottom, we’ve got to be better. I thought we had a really good week at practice, but we just gotta do the simple things right, man.”

Kevin Zeitler on how it feels to be a 2-5 football team:

“No one wants to be 2-5 right now. We keep doing good things here and there. Whatever we have to do to do them all the time it’s a completely different season. We’ve gotta keep moving forward and figure out how to get that done.”

“I don’t know if it’s a step back, but obviously it sucks. That’s as plain and blunt as you can be. It sucked today.”

Nate Solder on how the offensive line will look at their performance:

“My opinion on sacks is they can all be deceiving. We’re all out there together doing things together. It’s 11 men on the field. We know there’s things we need to improve. We’re going to watch that film very critically.”

“Nothing that we did not anticipate. We knew they were an excellent pass rushing group and that was a challenge for us.”

Michael Thomas on the big special teams blocked punt touchdown play:

“T-mac [Special Teams Coach Thomas McGaughey] challenged us on Special Teams. We kind of lost our way these last couple of weeks, especially giving up that play in New England, and he was like, ‘You guys aren’t playing physical enough. You guys aren’t making enough plays.’ He challenged me personally and told me that, ‘Word on the street is, number 31 is probably overrated on Special Teams’, so I took that personally, but he put me in a position [to be successful].”

Michael Thomas on how the Giants should respond to new offensive schemes:

“We’ve gotta execute better. We’ve gotta figure out, OK, they’re not doing anything that they were doing maybe the first five, six weeks of the season. They’ve transitioned to this, make those adjustments and go out there and just make plays. Tackle. Set edges.”

“At the end of the day whoever’s out there has to execute the fundamentals. Set edges. Tackle. Get to your gaps. Then let’s make adjustments as soon as we get back to the sideline.”

Jabrill Peppers on the team’s mentality going forward after the loss:

“We’ve just got to stay focused. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Obviously we didn’t get the end result we wanted, but we’ve got a lot of season left. Just gotta band together, execute better on game days. That’s all it comes down to.”