Amid more losing, Giants’ Brian Burns finds himself in ‘the same s---,’ despite personal success

Brian Burns took a moment to consider the question.

What has it been like to thrive individually this season, as the Giants fail?

“What has it been like?” he told NJ Advance Media. “Like every other year I’ve had in the league.”

Sure enough, here Burns is again in late December, finishing out another loss-filled year, even as he dominates.

This is not what the edge rusher expected when the Giants traded for him before the 2024 season and gave him a monster contract. He figured that after five years of struggles in Carolina to begin his NFL career, he would find long-awaited team glory in East Rutherford.

Instead, the Giants are 2-12, after going 3-14 last year. If they lose out, that would mark their second-worst season ever, in terms of winning percentage. Last year currently stands as their third-worst. In 2023, Burns went 2-15 with the Panthers. The previous four seasons, they won seven, five, five and five games. So this is indeed familiar territory for him.

He never imagined all this losing continuing after that blockbuster trade and contract.

“Did I think it would be different?” he said. “Yeah.”

And it wasn’t just that he hoped it would be.

“I wouldn’t say hope,” he said. “It was more like an expectation. You know, having wishful thinking. You don’t want to come in here thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to the same s---.’ I thought it would be better.”

Does Burns believe he has upheld his end of that high-paying deal?

“We ain’t done yet,” he said. “At the end, maybe.”

Most observers would say he has upheld it, given his 21.5 sacks through 31 games with the Giants. Burns shrugged.

“Yeah, but we keep losing,” he said.

So what now for Burns in 2026, the third year of his five-year deal? He will be 28 when next season opens. He knows NFL players only get a limited window to chase a Super Bowl ring. But despite the Giants’ current misery, he envisions success for them next season and beyond — largely because of promising rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart.

Burns doesn’t worry that he might be remembered as a star player who spent his entire career stuck on losing teams.

“No, because I see where we’re going,” he said. “We’ve got our guy [Dart]. And throughout my years in Carolina, it was always a struggle to find the guy to play the most important position on the field. But apparently, we have him. So I don’t think [losing a lot] is going to be in my future. If you think too much about the window, you’re going to lose it.”

Still, this season has been tough for him, even as he has racked up a career-best 13 sacks. He desperately wants to win. After the Giants’ epic collapse in Denver in Week 7 — which launched their current eight-game losing streak — he sat in his locker and sobbed.

“You’ve got to keep rolling with the punches,” Burns said this week. “It’s like: I came this far — but I didn’t come this far just to come this far. S---, got to keep pushing.”

Then he paused and pulled out his phone.

“I actually like what I just said,” he said. “I’m going to write it down.”

He opened his notes app and started typing: “I ain’t come this far just to come this far.”

Burns is big on writing out his mission. Before the season, as he does every summer, he wrote down his individual goals — five categories in all. (He said he’d wait until after the season to reveal them, noting he hasn’t hit them yet.) He scribbled the goals on a piece of paper, which he tucked away somewhere at his house.

“You can’t get what you want unless you put a vision to it,” he said. “I honestly don’t even know where [the paper] is at. I’m not big on having to keep looking at it. I know what it is.”

Burns preceded this standout season — which includes a 71.5 Pro Football Focus pass rush grade and 45 pressures, compared to 82.9 and 61 last year — by leaning on his usual offseason training routine. But even though he is justifying the trade and contract (a three-year, $90 million commitment by the Giants), he did make some tweaks.

As he prepared for 2026, he thought about what outside linebackers coach Charlie Bullen (now the Giants’ interim defensive coordinator) told him after last season: “To get somewhere you’ve never been, you’ve got to do something you never did.”

So Burns focused on intentionally embracing the smallest of details — and not just on the field. He calls these “the small wins.” To him, they matter a lot.

“It could be making my bed in the morning,” he said. “I feel like that equates to success. If I set my mind to do something and I actually do it, that’s a small win to me. I feel like that can improve your mood. That can just improve your process. Those small wins build up. It makes you feel good about yourself: I got that done, even though it was something so simple.”

The bed-making task isn’t just a hollow example. Burns actually does it every morning before he leaves his house for the Giants’ training facility. He’s not a neat freak by nature. But he leans into this chore — just like his brain feels more settled when he arrives at the facility early on a Friday and takes 20 extra minutes to organize his locker.

“I don’t know the science on it, but it makes me feel good,” he said.

Burns, who is unmarried and childless, lives alone. So when he arrives back to his big house — with that spacious yard for his three mammoth dogs — around 7 p.m., he loves walking into a tidy space. It helps him decompress amid another year of losing. He rarely thinks about football when he walks through that door, because he craves distance from it all.

“That’s like my safe place, with my dogs,” he said. “Just in the moment with my people. My dogs are my people. I kind of just separate all the way from it.”

Burns so cherishes his pets that he wears an oversized gold dog tag around his neck that is inscribed with their names and birthdates. There’s Zeus, a Husky, and two Presa Canario mastiffs — Aries and Athena. (The Greek names weren’t intentional. It started when Burns named his now-deceased dog Apollo, after a character from the 1990s TV show “Martin.”)

Burns’ dogs provide comfort. But sometimes, he needs to pick up the phone and vent to his mom, Angela, or brother, Stanley McClover, who is 14 years older and played 14 games as an NFL defensive end from 2006-08. McClover now manages Burns’ marketing opportunities — and reminds a frustrated Burns to control what he can control on the field.

McClover and Angela always implore Burns to appreciate where he’s at, telling him, “Guys wish they were in your place.”

Said Burns: “I just have to keep that in the back of my head. Regardless of whatever happens, I’m still blessed.”

Still, he said, this year “has been pretty challenging. But for the most part, I can see the vision. It’s not like we’re getting blown out every week. S---, if the game was just three quarters, our record would be flipped. Yeah, it’s been challenging. But it ain’t nothing I can’t withstand. There have been times I’ve been frustrated, but it doesn’t take nothing to snap back.”

One phone call to his mom or brother — after, say, the Giants blow yet another late-game lead — will “usually” do the trick.

Meanwhile, his old team down in Carolina has turned a corner this season with quarterback Bryce Young, the No. 1 overall pick in 2023. The Panthers are 7-7 and still have a chance to reach the playoffs for the first time since 2017.

“Decent,” Burns said of their season, offering tepid praise.

But amid the Panthers’ success, Burns isn’t looking back.

“Does it sting?” he said. “No. Because I know they had to do what they had to do [with the trade]. Had to put weapons and protection around [Young]. Our journeys just didn’t match. They needed to allocate the funds to protect and to help out their future. So I understood that. Nah, it doesn’t sting. It is what it is.”

And what it is — yet again — for Burns is this: More individual success, amid continued losing. So ultimately, do all the sacks and personal accomplishments matter to him?

“Yeah, it matters, because I worked for it,” he said. “But at the end of the season, it’s still a failure, because we didn’t get to where we were supposed to get to.”

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