EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – A rare opener against the Jets and a visit from the defending NFC North champion Chicago Bears will highlight the Giants' 2019 preseason schedule.
The NFL today released each team's preseason opponents and in Pat Shurmur's second year as head coach, the Giants will face teams from the AFC East (the Jets and New England Patriots), NFC North (Chicago) and AFC North (Cincinnati).
The dates and times of the games will be announced in the future.
The Giants will also play the Jets, Bears and Patriots in the regular season, and will be the visitors in each of those games.
Fifty years after they first played each other in a preseason game, the Giants and Jets will square off in Week 1 this summer (Aug. 8-12). It is just the third time they will meet in an opener. They also did so in 1983 and 2010, the latter in the first NFL game in MetLife Stadium.
This will be the 51st consecutive summer in which the Giants and Jets will meet since the series began in 1969. The Giants have won the three previous preseason meetings, including 22-16 last year, and trail in the annual series, 25-24-1. The tie was in 1972.
The Giants are 36-30-3 in preseason openers since 1950.
In Week 2 (Aug. 15-19), the Giants host the Bears, who they defeated here in overtime, 30-27, last Dec. 2. It will be the teams' first preseason meeting since 2012, when the Bears prevailed, 20-17. The Giants also hosted the Bears in a preseason game in 2011 and won, 41-13.
Two of the NFL's oldest and most storied franchises, the Giants and Bears met in 11 preseason games from 1950-1963 in locations as varied as Toronto, Memphis, Syracuse and Ithaca, N.Y. The Giants won five of those games. Overall, the Giants are 7-10 in preseason games vs. the Bears.
The Giants play their first road game in Week 3 (Aug. 22-25), when they face the Bengals in Paul Brown Stadium. It will be their first preseason visit to Cincinnati since 2015, when the teams held joint practices before the Bengals won the opener, 23-10.
The Giants are 3-1 vs. the Bengals in preseason play, winning in Giants Stadium in 1992 and '98 and in Cincinnati in 1993, and losing as visitors four years ago.
The Giants will visit the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots in their preseason finale, which is customarily played 10 days before Sunday of Kickoff Weekend. This year, that is Thursday, Aug. 29. This will be the 15th consecutive year the two teams will close the preseason by facing one another. Last year, the Patriots prevailed in MetLife Stadium, 17-12. The starting quarterbacks were a pair of rookies, Kyle Lauletta for the Giants and Danny Etling for New England.
The Giants lead the preseason series, 18-10. The two teams first met in the preseason in 1971.
The Giants have finished 2-2 in each of last four preseasons. In 2018, they won road games against Detroit and the Jets and lost home games to Cleveland and New England.
