What A Difference A Week Makes

Never in the pro football annals of New York has there ever been such a clear reversal of fortunes as there was yesterday. One week ago, the Jets were awful and the Giants were great. Prospects for the Jets to beat Pittsburgh were horrible while the Giants were picked by several NFL analysts to do away with those Eagles, no matter that they had Michael Vick and all those speedsters.

And, of course, as head coaches share their team’s failure or success, Rex Ryan looked like a complete dummy while Tom Coughlin was lauded right here in this column for his stability, especially in comparison to the nut down the road.

What a difference a week makes!

The Jets played 60 grueling minutes of what seemed to be Steeler football. The Giants played 52 minutes of great Giants football and then quit. The coaches quit, the players quit and even the fates seemed to quit. For the final 8 minutes of the game, the Giants were a who’s who of stupidity and maybe fatigue. Whatever they were, they really stunk.

As bad as the Jets have ever played, the Giants were five times as bad as the Jets ever were for those final 8 minutes. Rex Ryan had his guys ready to play for the whole game; Coughlin had his guys ready for 52 minutes. What a shame.

Just to recap, the Giants were up 21 with 8 minutes left. They then let Brent Celek, the Eagles tight end, catch a pass for about 70 yards. Immediately after that, they didn’t cover an onsides kick and watched Michael Vick work his wonders for another easy score. Then they did absolutely nothing on offense. Then they watched Vick destroy them again for the tying touchdown. Then they punted the ball on a line to the best damned punt returner in the game for the loss.

Everybody’s likening yesterday’s game to the Miracle of the Meadowlands in which the Eagles Herman Edwards grabbed a Joe Pisarcik fumble and ran for the winning TD on a play that should have been a kneel-down, a play that lives in infamy as the Giants coaching staff was summarily fired in almost that very instant.

But yesterday’s collapse, or I should say “Cough-lapse” was much worse than that game. It wasn’t just one play that killed them. It was a series of events that was caused by coaches who had stopped coaching and players who had stopped playing. And who can we blame for that?

Complacency can be a terrible thing. Or maybe it could be called “Cough-mplacency”. The Giants acted in every way as if the game was in hand. The 67-yard Celek TD because of a missed tackle wasn’t enough to rattle them. The failure of their return team to be aware of the possibility of an onsides kick is inexcusable. To this reviewer, it was the absolutely worst failure of the entire series of failures.

That their “hands” return team was not on the field was bad but not the most critical mistake. What was much worse was the up-front players’ total obliviousness to the ball. Even the “return” team’s up-front players should have been coached to first look for the ball. The Giants on that field were not prepared at all for that eventuality.

Two egregious failures in a row was, in retrospect, too much for the Giants defense to handle. From then on, they seemed to just watch as Eagles ran over, around and through them to tie the score. And of course the Giants offense did nothing but take time off the clock. As things turned out, it wasn’t enough.

Then there was the final Giants punt. The rookie punter did in fact try to kick the ball out-of-bounds but failed to do so. The replay showed that the rookie was aiming for the sidelines but the ball seemed to drop on the inside of his foot and the punt became a liner to the most dangerous man on the field. Those things happen, especially to rookies in tight spots. (Why a serious contender for the Super Bowl has a rookie in that spot has been a puzzler for me all season).

I won’t chastise Coughlin too much for berating his punter on the field after his ridiculously poor effort put the final nail into the Giants coffin, or “Cough-in”, but I thought it showed a lack of composure. For Coughlin, it was exercising restraint, or his own idea of “Cough-mposure”.

Gee, I hope I’m being fair to Coughlin. He did after all coach one hell of a game for 52 minutes. And it’s a damned shame that the game goes for 60. And I should say that it’s not typical of a Coughlin-coached team to quit in the final minutes. Maybe he’s just getting a little old for this game.

The bright side of yesterday’s action was that the Giants are still in the hunt, the Jets were terrific and my fantasy team won again, this despite Knowshon Moreno hurting his side, Austin Collie suffering another concussion and Vernon Davis having the misfortune to be coached by Mike Singletary, who has become the new Herman Edwards. (Not in the sense of the Meadowlands Miracle but in the sense of the player who went on to coach 10-6 teams into 6-10 teams).

Okay, enough Giants-bashing. The Jets were terrific from the opening kickoff to the final gun, much to the credit of Rex and the entire Jets team. Brad Smith’s taking of the opening kickoff for a touchdown set the tone for the game while the secondary’s sticky coverage of every Steeler receiver down-field in the closing seconds sealed the victory and staved off what could easily have been a dual New York disaster yesterday.

And, between those remarkable opening and closing plays, the play-calling was brilliant, Sanchez executed those plays to perfection and still another Edwards, one Braylon, made brilliant catches all day.

What a difference a week makes.