Allow me a slightly lengthy preface here.

Here at NYGMen, I’ve long relied upon the unique stats created by the smart guys at FootballOutsiders.com, especially their DVOA stat, which breaks down each play and determines its success based on situation and opponent.

DVOA is a better gauge of how good a team is than raw yardage stats, which are often skewed by situation – think about when a team piles on chunks of yards while getting blown out – and opponent – maybe a 90-yard rushing performance against the ’85 Bears is more impressive than a 100-yard game against the 2008 Seahawks.

It is also a better gauge of how good a team is than wins and losses, which are subject to simple luck: what if the tipped pass is caught by a wide receiver, or even falls incomplete, and doesn’t get intercepted and returned for a touchdown?  Looking at teams on a play-by-play basis puts in their proper place these random elements of luck that have a disproportionate impact on the outcome of games.

The value of a stat can be judged by how predictive it is going forward.  As it turns out, DVOA is more predictive of win-loss record going forward than both win-loss record itself and yardage stats.  In other words, a team with a good DVOA but a mediocre win-loss record can generally be expected to have a good win-loss record going forward.  Conversely, a team with a mediocre DVOA but a good win-loss record can expected to be mediocre in the future.

So there you have it: DVOA, the best gauge I know of how good a team will be from a given point forward.  The stat is expressed in terms of a percentage relative to the league average: to give a general benchmark, a team with a 30% DVOA is Super Bowl worthy, a team with a DVOA of 0 is average, and a team with a DVOA of -30% is first-pick-of-the-draft worthy.

Ok, anyway…

This is all prologue to a discussion of how ridiculously good the Giants have been this year.  Their DVOA of 56.7% is by far the best in the league, significantly better than the second-best Ravens (I know, it seems weird, but bear with me on DVOA, please), who stand at 42.5%.

Their offense has been truly phenomenal, sporting a DVOA of 41.1%, more than 10 points better than the second-best Broncos.  Their running game has been the best in the league by far, with a 38.6% DVOA that ranks much better than the second-place Falcons at 26.2%.  Their passing game ranks a very narrow second to Washington’s – of all teams! – by a margin of 43.7% to 43.6%.

The defense has been merely excellent: their DVOA of -12.4%, (which was brought down by getting sliced up by Carson Palmer) ranks 7th in the league.  They have been excellent against both run (-10.2%, which ranks 9th) as well as the pass (-14.0%, which ranks 7th).

And thanks to John Carney and some good returns by Hixon and even R.W. on Sunday, the G-Men are even very good on special teams, boasting a DVOA of 3.2%, which ranks 10th.

The upshot here is that the G-Men have been absurdly good on a play-by-play basis, probably better than you would have thought.  Detractors might point to our soft schedule thus far, but the beauty of DVOA is that it accounts for opponent.  (Although at this point in the season, the strength of opponents is hard to pin down.  Also, the G-Men get a lot of credit in this system for beating the Redskins, but it seemed pretty clear that the Redskins of Week 1 weren’t the same team as they are now.  But I digress…)

How good has this Giants start been?  It is the 7th best start since 1996, the point at which FootballOutsiders has enough data to calculate DVOA.  The top team on this list?  None other than the 2007 New England Patriots, with an absurd 72.4%.

Their offense has been nearly as good from a recent historical perspective: It ranks 8th best through four games.  Strangely, the 1999 Redskins top this list.

I’ll let Aaron Schatz, the genius behind FootballOutsiders, take this one home:

“Yes, that’s right – so far, the Giants have been that good.  They have a better pass defense than they had a year ago, and a much, much better passing game on offense.  Many NFL observers felt Eli Manning would continue to play at the high level he showed in last year’s postseason, with improved confidence moving him into the upper echelon of NFL quarterbacks.  Pro Football Prospectus 2008 said Manning would put up better fantasy numbers this year because of the “third down rebound effect.”  [A FootballOutsiders tenet that says that guys who are significantly worse on third down than they were on first and second – which Eli was last year – will bounce back as their third down performance gets more in line with their early down performance.]  It looks like both of these things have happened.  He’s the clear leader of the team and as we learned this week, he can even play well without Plaxico Burress on the field.  Meanwhile, the Giants offense leads the league on first down and second down and is fifith in third down.  Last year, the Giants offense ranked 12, 17, and 23 on those downs, respectively.”

“Well I think you expect that we’re gonna play well when the pressure’s on, and we’re gonna find a way to win the game.  And we did that today, although it was a difficult game.”

–Tom Coughlin

We’ll get into specifics later in the week, but for now, here are some general thoughts on today’s game:

It wasn’t the sharpest performance, but how can you not be very happy? Sure, the Bengals were a bad team in the previous two games, and having slipped to 0-3, there’s a good chance they’ll be a bad team from this point forward.  But make no mistake: they were a very good team today, led by a quarterback and an offense that didn’t look far removed from 2005, when they were one of the decade’s best.  As Coughlin and a lot of the players have said, give credit to the Bengals for playing an excellent game and putting our defense on its heels.

Last week, I wrote: “Two games into the season, the Super Bowl Champs couldn’t be more encouraging.”  Does this statement hold true three games into the season?  It’s an interesting question.

On one hand, for the first time this year, we didn’t play that well.  (Digression: Some have said we didn’t play that well in the first two games, but they’re wrong.  We did.  Even though the score was a little too close to comfort at points during both of those games, we dominated on a play-by-play basis.  Footballoutsiders.com, which calculates play-by-play stats based on situation and opponent, put us in the top spot in their advanced rankings this past week.  This is cold, scientific stuff, not some ex-jock bloviator being like, “They’re the champions, and until they’re not, they’re number one in my book.”)

Back to the point.  We didn’t play that well today for the first time all season.  I suppose if we had blown the Bengals out, that would’ve been a little more encouraging than gutting out a game we could have very easily lost.

But…  doesn’t this hard-fought win answer questions that weren’t addressed during our two dominant performances to start the year?  Pardon the cliche, but wasn’t there something “character building” about this game that is both a building block and a source of optimism going forward? After today, don’t you have a really good feeling about this team?

Going into the bye, we are where we wanted to be: 3-0 and healthy (though I’m not sure what happened to Aaron Ross’ shoulder…).  If anything, the struggle today will keep us grounded during the bye week as we prepare for the second half of our easy six-game opening stretch.  At this point, you’d have to say that a 6-0 start is likely, and anything less would be a disappointment.

**

Is there anyone out there who isn’t thankful Eli Manning is our quarterback?  At the 4:39 mark, was anyone not utterly confident Eli would take us down for the go-ahead touchdown?

Giants fans, do not take this feeling for granted.  Though it may be too early to call Eli Manning a “great quarterback” – the Super Bowl notwithstanding, there isn’t quite enough evidence yet to support this claim – there’s no doubt that he’s a clutch quarterback, a quality somewhat distinct from greatness.  By the end of the year, NYGMen predicts we will be able to count Eli as one of the game’s great, clutch quarterbacks.

I happen to be reading Ralph Vacchiano’s book, Eli Manning: The Making of a Quarterback, which I plan to review/discuss some time in the near future.  The book’s intro is written by Ernie Accorsi, who was famously smitten with Eli ever since laying eyes on him as a junior at Ole Miss in a game against Auburn.

The roots of Accorsi’s infatuation with Eli date back to 1970, his first year as the PR coordinator for the Baltimore Colts.  It was then that Accorsi first encountered John Unitas, the Platonic ideal for a quarterback whose form Accorsi has been trying to capture ever since.

Accorsi tells the story of noticing in Colts training camp in 1970 that Unitas has lost velocity on his ball, attributable to an elbow surgery two years before and old age.

“I turned to Milt [Davis, a Colts scout] and said, ‘Milt, he can’t throw like he used to.  Can we win with him throwing like that?’

“Milt, quite fatherly, turned to this brash rookie employee, put his hand on my shoulder and said: “Ernie, listen to me.  You evaluate the great quarterbacks on one element alone: Can they take their team down the field, with the championship on the line, and into the end zone?  That’s how you evaluate a great quarterback.

That, Unitas could still do.  We won the Super Bowl that season.”

And so Accorsi paid a King’s ransom for Eli Manning.  And three years later… “17-14 is the final score.  One touchdown, we are world champs.  Believe it, it will happen.”

(No, I’m not forgetting about the Asante Samuel and Brandon Meriwether near-picks on the final drive.  But you have to admit, Ernie was right: there’s something about Eli.)

**

So this was the trap game, it turns out.  It didn’t take the form of a flat performance against a bad opponent as we had feared heading into last week.  Instead, it was a flawed performance against a desperate and dangerous team.

**

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how easily we could have lost this game.  Sure, there are plenty coulda-woulda-shouldas we Giants fans could break out, but the Bengals clock management at the end of regulation was egregious.  If you’re a Bengals fan, you’re very, very pissed: your team just squandered its last, best shot to save its season.

You saw it, but to rehash: With 32 seconds left and a timeout remaining, the Bengals had just completed a 9-yard pass to Houshmenzadeh, giving them 3^rd and 1 at the NYG 14.  But they took 20 seconds before snapping the ball for the next play, which became an 11-yard pass to Antonio Chatman.  This gave them first and goal at the 3, but left them with only 4 seconds.  They had no choice but to bring in Graham to kick the field goal.

So in the span of 32 seconds, with a timeout to burn, the Bengals ran just two plays.  Based on how they were moving the ball on that drive, is there anyone out there who thinks they wouldn’t have won the game if they had run a third play during that time?  Shit, they could have easily run four plays.

**

Today’s game added to the mounting pile of evidence that Brandon Jacobs is the third best running back on the team.

Yes, I know the Bengals game-planned against the run, which makes Jacobs’ 14 carries for 35 yards (2.5 YPC) a little misleading.  And of course Ward’s draw-plays were more conducive to success, which makes his 80 yards on 9 carries (8.9 YPC) a little misleading too.  As Jacobs-apologists would have you believe, it was Jacobs’ bulldozing his way to a succession of 2.5 yard-runs that “softened” up the defense for Ward.  (As for his latest dropped past… well, that’s beyond even their excuses.)

But my question is this: Is there anything that can happen on the field that can change the coaching staff’s preconceived notion that Jacobs is our best back deserving of the vast plurality of carries? 

Alas, probably not, and the egregious misallocation of resources will continue.  Today, Jacobs got 56% of the carries.  Ward got 36%.  Bradshaw got 8%.

This week – during which we nearly lost, and all three of our division rivals won impressively – proved it: We cannot rest on our Super Bowl laurels.  We need to improve this team if we want to beat out the tough-ass teams in our division.  Earth, Wind and Fire in its current proportions is not a “winning formula,” as the coaches and many in the media might think, but rather something that might preclude us from being as good as we need to be to defend our crown.

Well you need a punter and Jeff Feagles is a good one. The Giants gave him a new two year contract, so the kicking situation has been sorted out for 2008.

Here’s the Bergen Record:

Jeff Feagles, maybe the NFL’s best punter ever, and NFC championship hero Lawrence Tynes re-upped.

Punter Jeff Feagles, who turns 42 next month, signed a two-year contract extension Tuesday to return for a 21st season. That came one day after placekicker Lawrence Tynes agreed to a reported five-year, $7 million deal that he is scheduled to sign sometime next week.

Feagles, who also serves as the holder for Tynes’ kicks, became the oldest player to appear in the Super Bowl when he punted in the 17-14 win over the New England Patriots, his first appearance in the big game after two decades in the NFL.

 “I still have some years left in me and I think I proved it this year,” said Feagles, who dropped 25 of his 71 punts inside the opponent’s 20-yard line in 2007. “And I just love being on this team now. I can’t say enough about the organization, either.

 “The decision was really a matter of if the team wanted to sign me back, and they did, and I wanted to play, and then it was just a matter of getting together, working some numbers, and then doing it.”

 Read more here.