Tom Coughlin should be Thanking God for Bye Weeks

The Giants suffered their most crushing loss of the year yesterday against San Diego. I guess the best thing to take from the game was the Giants D played quite well. Even if you take away the interceptions, the Giants blitzing schemes seemed to work some of the time and Aaron Rouse who took CC Browns starting spot played much better than the man he replaced. Rouse 6’4 227lbs. is built like a linebacker but has great speed making him eligible to play safety but at this point anyone is good replacement for CC. Boley also returned from his injury and played ok doing an above average job against Gates. Getting Boley is huge because he can blitz and has speed to cover most tight ends and can get from sideline to sideline as good as any other linebacker. Also Bruce Johnson the undrafted Miami University prospect played quite well for his first real chance at game play. The Giants seemed to get quite lucky with dropped passes from Charger receivers. Gates, Jackson and Floyd were turning their heads well before actually catching the ball, this mostly happens because receivers look for where to go with the ball but it looked like yesterday that they were scared of getting lit up by charging safeties.(This entire paragraph is excluding the Chargers final drive) Trust me the rest of the article isn’t so positive.

I need to get this off my chest immediately, Terrell Thomas intercepted a ball in the fourth quarter and ran it all the way back to the San Diego 4 yard line. It is inexcusable that the ball isn’t in the end zone within four plays of the interception. We have the biggest running back in the NFL and even with a holding penalty he can’t get in the end zone. Then Gilbride the boy wonder calls a screen to Nicks followed by TWO shotgun halfback draws. ARE YOU F@*%)^& KIDDING ME!!! Then you end up back where Thomas brought it in the first place on the 4 yard line and you kick the field goal?????? Forget the screen and halfback draws, I couldn’t disagree more with Coughlin’s predictable conservative call to kick the field goal. At that point the score is 17-14 Giants, and you have the man you’re paying zillions of dollars to on the four yard line in a situation where you could put the game away with a TD and not only do you more or less take the ball out of his hands on the first 3 downs you bring the kicking team out on 4th. Have some confidence in the QB that has been as cool as it gets in big late game situations. In kicking the field goal you force your young, inexperienced, pretty much useless secondary to go out and defend a hurry up offense whose top three receivers for the game are all 6’5. What the hell did you think was going to happen?

Corey Webster apart from a small handful of plays played very poorly against Vincent Jackson in the red zone. I will admit that this job is one of the hardest in football, the 6’5 241 pound wide out has a great speed for his size and in the red zone being 6’5 has its advantages. On the last TD by San Diego it looked like Webster thought the ball was over thrown on his blown coverage and gave up on the play only to realize that Jackson had beaten him by much more than he had assumed and it landed right in his lap. If the best CB on the team plays like this for the rest of the season the Giants are in some trouble.

On the Offensive side of the ball Gilbride continues to lose his mind. Between Bradshaw and Jacobs they only touched the ball 25 times and totaled 106 yards. Whether if it’s Jacobs pussy footing it or the offensive line not doing their job or Gilbride not getting his offense into more of a running groove something needs to change. In past years Jacobs would run to his assigned hole regardless of whether or not there was actually a hole there, instead he tries to find seams in the defensive line; WHICH ISN’T WORKING. My opinion Jacobs is trying to make his career longer by running away from contact rather than running straight into the backs of his offensive lineman and moving them along with the line of scrimmage. It’s well known that running backs of Jacobs build and running style don’t seem to last very long.

But Jacobs isn’t all to blame, the offensive line played horribly yesterday and have been for most of the season. Arguably the best line in the NFL last year hasn’t done much as of this season. At one point yesterday Eli had something like 22 attempts, 4 of which were incomplete. All of those incompletes were thanks to being chased around the field by d lineman and having to throw the ball into the dirt. Gilbride and his offensive linemen need to get back to old Giants offense and run the ball right off the bat and do it a lot. Even if Jacobs isn’t moving the pylons he punishes defenses with his contact, tell me would want to tackle a 265pound man who runs a 4.5 40 time running full speed at you. Now imagine having to deal with that constantly over a period of 2 quarters. I mean he’s 3 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than Ray Lewis. This opens up opportunities for Bradshaw and receivers and completely opens up the secondary with play actions. But no Gilbride runs Jacobs around tackles instead of between them for whatever reason where he has yet to be succesful ever.This stuff isn’t complicated and Gilbride needs to grow a pair and attack defenses instead of letting Eli get chased around the Jersey swamps every time he drops back.

Now you go into your bye week 5-4 and you come out having to play the Falcons, a team that’s gunning for a wild card spot that you need. So this game is the season. If the Giants lose you can kiss the playoffs goodbye. After that game you get four days of rest and it’s off to Denver to play a Bronco team who up to today has one loss.

To say the coaching staff and the rest of this team needs to grow a set a balls really quickly is an understatement. I still can’t see this team not making the playoffs so my prediction for the rest of the season is Philly beats Dallas the last game of the year to secure the Giants as the wildcard winner.

-Lucky