Right now, they see a wounded dog in the division, and they didn’t like the way the Cowboys came into this season basically anointing themselves Super Bowl Champions before the season began.  And, you know, they’re smelling blood and they’re gonna give it everything they’ve got.

–Troy Aikman

**

Wow, that was an awful Cowboys team we played today, and makes you wonder if things will be all that different when Romo comes back.  Aikman and Buck made this point a lot during the game, but quarterback play was only part of the problem.  What about stopping the run (we averaged 5.9 yards per carry), running the ball themselves (3.4 yards per carry), or protecting whoever is playing quarterback (4 sacks and tons of pressure)?

In the rubbing it in department, behold and enjoy the following G-Men quotes:

Plaxico Burress: “I mean, they had a star on their helmets so it was a Cowboy game to me.”

Justin Tuck: “They still had us outnumbered 10 Pro Bowlers to none, so I don’t see where all the sympathy is coming from.”

And even some words of wisdom from our favorite Cowboy shit-talking choke-artist, Patrick Crayton:  “In games like this against teams like this, if you don’t bring your A-game, you will get your ass whooped like we got our ass whooped tonight.”

It’s too early to write the Cowboys off, but making the playoffs would require quite the ill run.  It’s possible, and if they make that run, watch out come playoff time.  But they really have no room for error as they pursue the Wild Card.  At 5-4, they’re not catching us for the division.

Good God, that team is a mess.

**

But we’re not.  The 2008 New York Giants: Another week, another statement.

Ah, where to begin here?  Obviously the D, which allowed only one touchdown and 183 total yards, forced 4 turnovers, and was so dominant that even a downright bad performance by Eli didn’t get in the way of a blowout.

All three defensive units were nearly flawless.  We’ll start with the linebackers, who haven’t gotten much love this year.  Danny Clark made a team-high nine tackles and was generally all over the place, shooting gaps and making plays in space.  Is this guy rounding into Kawika Mitchell, redux? 

Chase Blackburn filled in for Brian Kehl – whose toe injury forced him to miss practice this week but isn’t serious – and did an admirable job.  This guy’s such a good player – even when Wilkinson comes back, wouldn’t you rather see Blackburn splitting those weakside snaps instead?  He needs to be on the field.

And Antonio Pierce made two big plays.  The first was when he stripped T.O. deep in our territory after Eli’s weird fumble.  The second was on the Cowboys second series, when he ran stride-for-stride with Jason Whitten down the seam and forced a perfect throw from Johnson that didn’t come.  Tony P has been assailed for his notoriously poor coverage of that seam route, so it’s only right to give credit where it’s due here.

Moving over to the D-line, Tuck was a force.  Coming into the season, we knew he was good, but it was still a question whether he would blossom into a truly elite player.  Eight games and six sacks in, that question is close to being definitely answered.

Tuck had the 2.5 sacks yesterday, but the guy I noticed the most, on a play-by-play basis, was Kiwanuka.  ‘Nuke was way too quick for Flozell Adams, and after being named the Defensive Player of the Week last week, he had his second excellent game in a row.  He only had one sack, but he routinely beat Flozell to the edge and forced Johnson/Bollinger to step up and get flustered.

It appears ‘Nuke is fully recovered from both the high-ankle injury from Week 1 and the leg injury from last year and is ready to explode into a full-fledged pass-rushing force.  I still think he plays too high and can be undisciplined against the run.  But he can straight-up abuse left tackles with below-average quickness, like Pittsburgh’s Max Starks and Flozell the Hotel.

As for the interior guys, I actually didn’t notice that much, but holding Marion Barber to 2.8 yards per carry speaks for itself.

Praise for the secondary begins with Corey Webster – or as Chris Berman calls him, The Dictionary – and his two picks.  The great thing about Webster’s first pick – the one he brought back to the Dallas 27 – was that it came right after that sideline circus-catch by Roy Williams.  Webster covered Williams very well on that play, but a perfect throw and a semi-miraculous catch beat him.  Such is the nature of playing cornerback or defense in any sport: If the offense executes perfectly, they’ll do what they want to do.  But the offense doesn’t always execute perfectly, which was apparent on the next play when Johnson badly overthrew T.O. and the ball sailed right to Webster, who provided great coverage for the second play in a row.  If you have a short memory and do your job play after play, you’re gonna get good results.  That’s how you play cornerback.

Let’s also use this opportunity to praise Webster’s season in general and how far he has come.  His improvement has been well-documented, but it bears repeating: he has evolved from a complete bust into a truly excellent player, though it will take a while for his reputation to catch up to the quality of his play (another Super Bowl ring will help, though).  I never thought I’d say this, but has Corey Webster become a guy you don’t want to challenge?  (And yes, he got beat by T.O. on that short touchdown.  But he had no help in the middle of the field because we brought a blitz.  Tough assignment.)

Then there’s Aaron Ross, who I didn’t notice in pass coverage (good thing) but who I did notice in run support (also a good thing).  Ross had 5 tackles including 3 solos – I continue to be impressed with the angles he takes and how surely he wraps up guys, usually by going low.  And for all those people who panicked so much after the Cleveland and San Francisco games?  I think you were overreacting.

Terrell Thomas started at nickelback and played well, making a big play when he separated T.O. from the ball on 3rd down on the Cowboys eventual scoring drive (The ‘Boys converted the 4th down on the next play.  Oh, and that touchdown drive was illegitimate anyway – that personal foul on Tuck for driving Bollinger into the ground was bullshit.).  Apparently the G-Men are very high on Thomas, and after today, we can see why.

After Thomas was injured on that play – I don’t know the status of that one – Sam Madison came in and provided excellent coverage of Roy Williams on an endzone fade.  At that moment, the following thought crossed my head: Holy shit we’re deep!

That goes for the safety position too, where James Butler headlined the action with his second athletic pick in two weeks.  Butler sprained his knee during the game, but he’s confident he will play in Philly next week.  James Butler… I think us fans are coming around.

Kenny Phillips and Michael Johnson chipped in with five tackles apiece, and another forgotten veteran, Sammy Knight, made five stops also, all of them solo.  Yep, we’re mad deep…

**

Offensively there was a lot to like too.

Obviously the running game, which ran for a clean 200 yards on 34 carries.  As always, the O-Line was the big star here.  Aikman – who, as loyal NYGMen commenter Dan pointed out, has gotten to know the Giants very, very well over the past few years – heaped his usual praise on the fatties up front.  At this point, there’s not too much more to say about them, other than to say definitively that they’re the best in the league.

I’ll once again avail myself of FootballOutsiders stats to prove my point: The G-Men rank third in adjusted line yards (run blocking) and second in adjusted sack rate.  No other team ranks nearly so well across the board.

As for the running backs, Jacobs bounced back from a rough game last week to average 6.9 yards per carry, including two Tiki-esque zig-zag runs in the second half.  He ran over guys and he juked guys out of their cleats.  He was terrific.

Derrick Ward was his usual super-competent self, a performance that included a number of key first downs.  Ward might be one of the most underrated players in football: how confident do you feel with the ball in his hands?

And Ahmad Bradshaw, stashed in the doghouse though he might be, turned in an impressive performance in his brief outing nonetheless.  That guy seems to rip off an awesome run every game.  (Here comes the weekly ritual: We need to get this guy more touches – it’s criminal how underutilized this resource is.)

As for the receivers, there’s Boss and his soft hands, Smith and his nose for the first-down marker, along with Amani and his solid awesomeness.  No receiver stuck out, but there was nothing to complain about.

Except maybe Plax, who dropped those two passes (including a touchdown), and had that miscommunication with Eli on Jenkins’ pick-six.  But while it wasn’t a good game for Plax, I can’t kill the guy. 

For one, the pick-six looked like it was Eli’s fault, at least judging by the body-language during the sideline conversation that was caught on camera.  On the play, Jenkins jumped the route, which probably called for Plax to break it off and run a streak.  Plax saw that, but Eli didn’t.  And wouldn’t that throw probably have been picked even if Plax ran did what Eli thought he was going to?

Secondly, Plax’s great blocking was on display during two key runs – Jacobs’ 31-yard run and Ward’s 17-yard touchdown run – on the touchdown drive that put us up 35-14.  (The awesome thing about that drive was that we answered the Cowboys’ scoring drive right then and there.)

So lay off Plax.  It was a rough game in a tumultuous season, but there’s much less to worry about than many people will have you believe.  He finally showed contrition this week and we’re 7-1 with an awesome passing game.  There’s no crisis.

**

So far, it has been almost all praise.  But now we get to Eli, who was pretty bad, no question about it.  To rehash, he went 16 for 27 (59%, not terrible) for a season-low 147 yards, averaging a sub-par, but also not awful, 5.4 yards per attempt (his career average is 6.4, and his 2008 average is 7.1).  The damaging things were his three turnovers, including an inexplicable fumble and the pick-six by Jenkins.

Today was Eli’s second truly bad game this year, the first being the Cleveland game.  But doesn’t it seem like there’s a difference between these games and the bad games he had in the past, when he looked completely shook out there?  In his bad games this year, he has looked a little reckless.  But I’m sure most Giants fans would prefer Eli to have a bad game due to this overconfidence rather than the underconfidence that characterized his bad games in the past.

A mitigating circumstance in all this was the Cowboys’ solid pass rush, which was really the only facet in which they were remotely successful.  And look at it this way: How ridiculous is it that we beat the shit out of the Cowboys when Eli had a bad game?

**

Other negatives were the kickoffs and the kickoff return game.  On the kickoffs, Carney’s boots have reached a critical point.  The problem is that we shouldn’t part with him as a field goal kicker – a kicker having an automatic season must be respected.

So it looks like we’re gonna have to carry two kickers.  Yes, this seems absurd considering Tynes’ kicks are no great shakes, but it’s honestly the best thing we can do.  Let’s just not dress Rueben Droughns and be done with it.

And on kickoff returns, doesn’t it always seem like the wedge doesn’t get up-field enough for Bradshaw, which causes Ahmad to slow down and tip-toe into it?  This has been going on all year – it prevents Bradshaw from exploding through a hole for a big return.  There aren’t many areas in which this team to improve, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get a lot better in these facets.

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.”

Some of the coverage of the Plax’s comments today has been pretty misleading, and, I believe, kind of misses the point.

ESPN’s article, which has occupied the site’s top spot all evening, led with: “An unapologetic Plaxico Burress rejoined the New York Giants on Monday, noting he didn’t lose any sleep after he Super Bowl champions suspended him for a game.”

The beat writers are a little more even-handed, knowing that Plax being Plax isn’t nearly as bad as Manny being Manny or T.O. being T.O.

Sure, Plax’s attitude during the interview was defiant, and he definitely said some ridiculous things.  But if you read the whole transcript – you can read it in four parts here – it’s clear that although he stopped short of apologizing, he knows what he did was unacceptable.

To wit:

–“Maybe I could’ve put a call in.”

–“I definitely let them down.”

–“They made the decision for the best of the team and I have a lot of respect for that.  They made the decision to suspend me for a week, which I was cool with.  We all agreed to it and moved on.”

–“Will I make the same decision?  Yes.  Will I handle the situation a little better?  Yes, I’ll put in a phone call”

So going forward, Plax gets it, or at least he gets it enough.  His defiant attitude during the interview was probably the result of feeling cornered by the media.  Plax is the proverbial “Proud Man,” and like many people, probably has a hard time distinguishing between an apology and a ritual of humiliation.  That’s a frustrating quality, but hardly a reason to write the guy off as a bad teammate.

Now, I don’t mean to excuse Plax’s actions or comments.  There was certainly a lot in that interview to make you angry.

His repeated insistence that he would do it again – or as he put it: “It’s like I told them, if I have a decision to make about my family or son and things like that, I wouldn’t change anything about it” – was pretty infuriating.

But do you think he really meant that?  It doesn’t jibe with the “apologies” above.  Rather, this struck me as a misguided tactic to get the media off his back by playing the family card.  But the problem, obviously, wasn’t his choosing his family over football.  It was that he didn’t call.  He knows that, but maybe he naively believed this tactic could make him a sympathetic character.  It backfired, and he wound up making himself look worse.

Also, it was weird when he said he only watched “a little bit of [the game].  I watched the first half.”  If an athlete losing $100 grand and shrugging his shoulders doesn’t infuriate the average fan, this might.  Didn’t watch the game?  For Heaven’s sake, many of us have watched it twice already!

But here’s the deal here: We can choose to get bent out of shape about what he said, or we can accept that this situation, while imperfect, doesn’t present an imminent threat to team morale.  It doesn’t even present a gathering threat.

As Ralph Vacchiano wrote in his live chat with readers last week, “I don’t think Burress and Coughlin have ever really gotten along.  They’ve peacefully coexisted more than anything else.”

Or as Plax himself said today, “We hit and miss sometimes and things like that.”

It’s a manageable situation, this Plax being Plax.  But you know what else was Plax being Plax?  Gutting out last season on a shredded ankle, adding a separated shoulder in Green Bay and then a torn knee before the Super Bowl.

So let’s move on and start thinking about Cleveland.

So much for the post-Super Bowl honeymoon and the hunky-doryness engendered by the 3-0 start: As FOXSports originally reported, Plax has been suspended for two weeks for “insubordination.”  Apparently, he missed practice/meetings on both Monday and Tuesday, and didn’t respond to phone calls asking where in the world he was.

This means that Plax is suspended from all team activities until October 6^th, without pay, meaning that he will miss the Seahawks game.  Even when he gets back, you have to wonder if he’ll be at his best after being away from football for two weeks.  Just a bad situation…

Obviously, this is an extreme punishment from Tom, but one he felt he had to lay down.  Tom always talks about the principles of team, and in this instance, he put his money where his mouth is.  If a guy like Calvin Boothe or Dave Tollefson pulled what Plax did, we wouldn’t have objected to Tom making an example of them with something much harsher.  Say what you want about Tom, he showed he is a man of principle.  Especially considering Plax is only missing one game and our depth at the position, I have no problem with this – it will be good for this team in the long run.

Obviously, a brutal job by Plax to go AWOL.  Running a football team is like running a football play: every last man must be accountable for being in the right place.  If one man is not where he’s supposed to be, it threatens to screw up the whole operation.  This type of stunt – just falling off the face of the fucking Earth for two work days – gets you fired from many real jobs, so it’s hard to feel too sorry for Plax here.

The unanswered question here is: What in the world was going on with Plax?  Maybe this will come out, but for now, speculation seems silly.

Plax has been celebrated, and deservedly so, for how much he’s changed in the past couple years.  He heroically played all last year on a torn ankle, and played the Super Bowl with a seriously messed up knee.  As I just read in Ralph Vacchiano’s book about Eli, Plax acknowledged that his public arm-flailing displays after not being thrown to were bad for Eli and the team, so he approached Eli, apologized, and said he’s cut it out.  And obviously this summer, he got himself a new contract – and a very reasonable one, at that – with no holdout and virtually no public griping.  Combine that with his excellent downfield blocking and his obsessive note-taking during team meetings, and it seemed like Plax had evolved into the ideal teammate.

But now this.  Hopefully, this is nothing more than a temporary backslide, a moment of immaturity that he will duly apologize for and move on from.  From what I read, his progress as a professional has been real.  He screwed up pretty badly here, but it shouldn’t undermine everything he’s done up to this point.  Hopefully he takes his punishment like a man, moves on, and resumes being the good teammate he has been.

At worst, however, this sours his relationship with Coughlin and the team and evolves into a season-long – or worse, contract-long – distraction.

Correction: There wasn’t any activity on Tuesday, so Plax only missed meetings on Monday.

Update: Plax’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus, said Plax was attending to a family emergency, but didn’t provide specifics.  He said that while Plax is contrite, he’s appealing the suspension.

In Plax’s absence, Domenik Hixon will start as the X receiver.

“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.

“I want you to get on your feet, I want you to make some noise, I want you to get ready to stomp somebody out and welcome the New York Giants, Super Bowl Champions.”

 –Michael Strahan

I. Preliminary Thoughts on The Game

You have to be somewhere between pleased and very pleased with Thursday’s game. 

Yes, the offense went into the tank during the second half.  As is often the case, we left ourselves vulnerable to a comeback, which the Redskins, with their West Coast Offense not yet fully installed, happened not to be capable of making.

And for all the good things Eli did, he still did a bunch of bad things that showed he hasn’t turned into Peyton during the off-season.

As they always have, the Giants won ugly on Thursday, a trait that being Super Bowl champions will not change.

But the game provided an encouraging early answer to the biggest question mark going into this year.  Our pass rush was just fine without Osi and Strahan.  If the Tuck/Kiwanuka/McDougle combo is not a significant downgrade from the Osi/Strahan/Tuck combo, we should, at absolute worst, be almost as good as we were last year.

And if we improve in the other ways that all of us are expecting – Eli making The Leap, a healthy and potentially dominant Plax, a much better secondary, a better command of Spags’ defense – we should be significantly better, barring injuries.

More specifics on the game will follow as I pour over the game-tape.  In the meantime, here are some miscellaneous thoughts.

II. Strahan’s Pre-Game Thing:

How awesome was that?  And what would I have given to be at the Meadowlands?

A lot has been said about Strahan since he retired, so I’ll only add this:

While his outsized, eccentric personality is somewhat un-Giantlike in the traditional sense, winning the ‘Bowl has made him one of the most beloved G-men of all time.  Good for him.  His big ego and gaudy sack totals – both on display in the record-breaking Favre-sack in 2001 – masked his completeness as a defensive end and as a balls-out, team-oriented player.

(I should note that it was originally reported that he made $75,000 for his appearance, but both Strahan and the Giants denied this.)

In New York, for better or worse, you almost have to win a title to validate your career.  If the G-Men had been knocked out last year against Dallas, I think there’s a chance that Strahan might have lived the rest of his life as an underappreciated all-time great.  Fair or not, immortality almost comes only with the ring.  And now Strahan has it.  Could this have been predicted during his holdout last year?

II. Some More Thoughts on the Pre-game Intro:

–Spike Lee needs to stop getting credit as “the quintessential New York sports fan.”  He isn’t.  I’ll give him credit on the Knicks – it’s clear he loves them – but that’s it.  As far as football and baseball, he’s been documented to have worn the jerseys of the Giants, Jets, Mets, and Yankees.

The first rule of being a New York sports fan is rejecting the fallacy that it’s possible to be a “New York fan.”  It isn’t.  Being a sports fan is a monogamous relationship – if you don’t love one team and one team only, you don’t love any team.

–For those of you wondering, the Giants of Super Bowl years past who took part in the pre-game ceremony were: Harry Carson, Stacy Robinson, Karl Nelson, Brad Benson, Billy Ard, Howard Cross, Rodney Hampton, O.J. Anderson, Carl Banks, and Mark Bavaro.  Great job by those guys.

But no L.T.?  No Simms?  Kind of a bad job.

III. Giants Fans

Strahan referred to Giants fans as being “by far the best fans in all of sports.”  Frankly, I disagree.

When I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it seemed like the Meadowlands was an intimidating place to play.  There were the winds, the tough D, and supportive fans who intimidated other teams with their deep-throated, thunderous New York passion.

But for a while now, and especially during the Coughlin era (pre-Patriots regular season finale last year), it seems Giants fans have become an easily-quieted, early-to-leave, and an overall counterproductive bunch.  Before the December 29^th of last year, the fans took a distant, judging, and antagonistic attitude towards the team. 

And the team realized this.  Let’s be clear: The whole Antonio Pierce-led “Nobody respects us mantra” isn’t directed at the national media, but much more the local media… and the fans.  The “Road Warriors” mentality was borne out of the G-Men feeling unloved in their own home.

Now, a lot of the scorn the Coughlin-era Giants received since the promise of early 2005 has been warranted.  The team had been maddeningly inconsistent, and until last December 29^th, they always could be counted on to fade down the stretch.

Here’s hoping the upshot of last year’s run is a love-affair with this team, rather than an entitlement complex.

According to his blog over at the Bergen Record, Vinny DiTrani says Gibril Wilson may hit the open market next week.

The Giants winning the Super Bowl also addsd to Wilson’s bargaining power. Teams like to bring in guys from successful organizations to bring that winning attitude to the locker room.

And let’s not forget Gibril is a pretty good player.

To me, it will be a big loss, but the Giants have overcome those type of losses last year.

Tom Coughlin took time out to speak to the press at the NFL Combine on Friday.

As reported on Giants.com:

“I’m trying to make sure that all the things along the way that you don’t read about or see on TV or whatever, the interviews and that type of thing, I don’t want to miss out on anything that was really good,” Coughlin said. “Hopefully, that’s not going to happen, but it’s a blur the way that goes. But it’s wonderful to hear people say ‘Super Bowl champions’ and ‘champions of the world.’ It’s kind of nice to get here and be back in the football environment and see so many friends from years gone by, people that have been in the league for a long time. It’s just a nice thought.”

Coughlin is not one to dwell on the past, even when it is worth celebrating. So he was happy to travel to Indianapolis for the combine, where he can begin to gauge more than 300 draft-eligible players and start preparing in earnest for the 2008 season.

“You really don’t ever stop,” Coughlin said. “We got back (from the Super Bowl) on a Monday night, we had our exit meetings, etcetera, on Tuesday morning, we had a magnificent experience in the Canyon of (Heroes) over there in New York and we had a great session when we came back to the Meadowlands with the fans being there. Then, all of a sudden, the next day we had to do (player) rankings and evaluations and write-ups and needs and things of that nature. So we went right ahead and did that. And then, as soon as we got back (from vacation), we continued along those lines with the information coming about the combine and free agency and started the evaluation of free agents, started our cut-ups. So we jumped right back into it.”

Because the Giants season ended so late, and the coaches were given much-deserved vacations last week, Coughlin did not have as much time as usual to prepare for the combine. But he’ll gladly make that tradeoff every year.

Just got it last night. I have to tell you, I expected something different; something closer to Giants Among Men or True Blue. 

The highlights only give you the games and nothing more and the music is pretty much the same throughout.

But the special features give you a lot. Interviews with Eli Manning, Tom Coughlin, Michael Strahan, for some reason, Mathias Kiwanuka highlight the extras. There’s also the two playoff games in Dallas and Green Bay and the Super Bowl Halftime show with Tom Petty.

I paid $21.99 at Blockbuster, but I am sure you can find it cheaper elsewhere.

From the Daily News, Plaxico Burress may be looking to get a new contract.

Drew Rosenhaus, Burress’ agent, didn’t deny that a few minutes ago when he spoke to reporters at the NFL scouting combine here in Indianapolis. There have been rumors for months that Burress is going to ask to renegotiate his deal – and those rumors have only gotten stronger since he caught the game-winning touchdown pass in Super Bowl XLII.

“That is going to be between myself and the Giants,” Rosenhaus said. “I can’t comment on that publicly.”

If Burress does ask to renegotiate, it could be one of many offseason headaches for GM Jerry Reese. If Michael Strahan decides not to retire, he’s expected to ask for more money. There are already several NFL sources who expect Osi Umenyiora to ask to redo his deal. And there was some speculation that Jeremy Shockey, another Rosenhaus client, was going to ask for more money – though that was before his season ended with a broken leg.