NFL-Giants: NY Giants football news

It was a loss, but I imagine the Giants are feeling OK. They had a chance to play some backups, including David Carr who went 8 for 11.

Manning had a decent day as well though stats-wise not as pretty as Carr’s. There are a couple of throws Manning missed that could have really changed the game. Still, our backups showed that they could against the NFC North champs and that’s not bad.

I’d write more but I’m in London (saw the game at Sports Cafe, 80 Haymarket near Picadilly). Back in a week.

Here’s a nice article by Mike Lupica for reflecting on good NY sports moments.

While the Carolina people try to convince themselves that a #2 or #5 seed is fine, we can sit back and relax because our Giants have the #1 seed: a bye plus home playoff games. It’s a great time to be a Giants fan!

The question now is who plays vs. Minnesota and who rests?

This article suggests 7 years and 45 million might get Jacobs signed. I defintiely think he’s worth 6.5 milion a year, but I’d like to see a contract like Plax’s where not too much of the money is guaranteed.

I trust that the Giants will be fired up as they play for the #1 seed vs. the Panthers today but maybe the coaches will mention this game, in which the Giants shut down Jim Brown. Sure would be nice to see some dominant defense today…

Newsday says Jacobs should play but what will really effect the Giants offense is the state of the offensive line. The New York Times notes that both the offensive line and Kevin Gilbride promise a change. I hesitate to criticize Gilbride too much but I think we need some pretty obvious adjustments, ones that could have been made in the Cowboys game as it became clear things weren’t working according to plan.

We need faster developing pass plays, the so called “dink and dunk” offense. We also need to do a better job of disguising the offense. How many times did we see Ward line up 8 yards behind Manning, a typical running formation.? Seemed like we always ran and Dallas always knew it was coming.

Sports Network points out that Carolina seems to be the team with momentum at the moment. Their running game has come up big in the past two weeks while the Giants running game has not. We’ll have to change that if we want to win.

The Giants lost their second game in a row. This one wasn’t quite as painful as the Philly game because our defense didn’t get pushed around too badly. I’m not saying that the defense played great or anything, but they weren’t painful to watch (other than a few missed tackles).

The offense, however, got spanked. Manning was sacked 8 times which shouldn’t really happen in an NFL game because professionals aren’t supposed to get beaten so often… I hope Seubert and McKenzie are both OK and I don’t mean to add insult to injury, but they did both get their butts whooped before getting hurt. Diehl played the worst I’ve ever seen him play so overall I’d say the offensive line had a pretty bad day…

Good news before the Cowboys game: Corey Webster signed till 2013 for 43 million with 20 million guaranteed. The story is here. How good is Webster? Webster is 26, he is physical, he has had only 20% of the passes thrown in his direction completed in 2008, he also has three picks and a league-best 24 pass breakups.

So we have a chance to do some nice things if we beat the Cowboys. However, against Philly our defensive line looked tired and got pushed around. The Cowboys line can certainly push people around too, especially if the Giants line plays tired again.

I don’t think we can expect our linebackers to bail us out either. They looked real slow against Philly although I blame Spagnuolo for that – putting Pierce on Westbrook the entire game was stupid at the beginning and plain stubborn in the second half. But anyway if our linebackers have to chase people we could be in trouble.

The Eagles beat the Giants 20-13. The absolute worst part was watching our defensive line get pushed around. Watching our offense get shutout for over 59 minutes wasn’t all that great either though.

Was scoring that TD at the end of the game some sort of mental victory for the Giants? Considering how the offense couldn’t seem to get on the same page and held the ball for about 25 minutes, I think it is. Maybe ending the game with something positive will help guys focus as they prepare for the Cowboys.

No one expected the Giants to go undefeated, but I certainly didn’t expect them to get pushed around like they did in the Cleveland game. Was it a motivation thing? Was it the Plax distraction? Was it not having Plax (Hixon had a pretty big drop)? Was it something I’ll never understand?

The only thing I’m pretty sure about is that the Giants got their butts kicked but not because Plax wasn’t on the field. He didn’t push our defensive line around. He didn’t bribe the refs to let the Eagles hold all day (like they seem to get away with every time we play). He didn’t slow down our linebackers (did our guys look like the slowest LBs in the NFL today?). He didn’t make our receivers drop passes.

Let’s just hope the Giants down play like this again until next season…