Fri 31 Aug 2007
With his soul having been thoroughly searched, Michael Strahan is coming back for at least another season in Big Blue (and hopefully one or two more after that without this ridiculous bullshit.)
It couldn’t have come a moment too soon, and in fact, probably came around a week too late: Are they just gonna bump Justin Tuck out of the Week 1 starting lineup in favor of a guy who has but a week of practice under his belt? Probably not, which means it would have been nice if he had come to camp just a little bit earlier.
But I’m sure it won’t take him too long to get back to being the Strahan of old. Remember: he’s been injury prone the past three years, but he really hasn’t lost any effectiveness at all. By Week 2, this ridiculousness will be 90 percent forgotten about and we’ll have a pretty sick defensive end trio (threesome?) in Strahan, Osi, and Tuck.
They’ll all play, too: apparently, one of the many reasons for Strahan’s holdout is that his feelings were hurt after Reese told him he wanted to rotate him out on some plays in favor of Tuck.
So welcome back, Mike. We’re gonna need you. Now strap it on and let’s play ball.
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:42 am
I found the whole Strahan situation somewhat baffling. No one has been the face of the organization for as long as Strahan has been. At least for me anyway, his stature is approaching LT as one of the iconic faces of the franchise. When you think of players that have been consistently dominant at their position over the last decade he’s up there at the top of the list. In addition he’s a character guy, one who’s a leader and mentor to the younger guys. Clearly now that he’s on the downward slope of his career he doesn’t lead the defense(that’s AP’s job now anyway) but he’s still a presence on the field and off. So to have him in a hold-out situation is somewhat embarrassing to the team. I can’t understand how the situation got to the point where it did. Like many fans these days, I suspect that the situation was probably exacerbated by the fact that Coughlin doesn’t seem to like Strahan, and the 2 have butted heads in the past. I’m not going to launch in to an anti-Coughlin tirade here, but I am glad that Strahan’s coming back; we’re going to need him this year.
September 6th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I’ll tell you what it was - he got destroyed in divorce court and was trying to grab an extra mil or two to pay off his ex-wife.