Giants Talk: Not Yet Ready For Prime Time

Smack down by Colts shows Giants have ways to go

INDIANAPOLIS – To be fair, it was not the Giants talking a big game before their nationally broadcast showdown with the Colts on Sunday night.

This was why it came as a complete shock when a majority of presumably astute football observers came to the same conclusion that the Giants would not only keep this game close, but also win it outright.

Slow down folks.

As the team made that slow walk off the field with their heads down after a 38-14 drubbing by the Colts that was not as close as the final score, they learned a valuable lesson. They could leave with the solace that they while they are not bad as they were made to look on this night, they are not as good as many made them out to be.

“Obviously not what we came to do,” said Head Coach Tom Coughlin.

All one had to do was look up at the scoreboard after the first seven minutes after the Colts marched down the field with little push back by the defense for them to realize that they were not fighting a scrub and were in a battle with a higher class of fighter.

For the Giants, this was the equivalent of going from fighting Peter McNeeley in one fight to Mike Tyson in his prime in the next.

“We have to understand we did get our butt whupped tonight,” safety Antrel Rolle said.

After their convincing second-half victory over the Panthers, many in the (drive by) media began to proclaim the Giants a very good team, one very capable of making some noise in the NFC East.

However, as the hours began to count before their game with the Colts, all one had to do was see the Panthers put together a tremendously weak effort at home against the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They lost 20-7, and looking bad doing so to make one wonder whether if much of what we saw last week was an aberration.

The Giants are slightly above average, but they are not ready to play a team the caliber of the Colts yet. Not to beat Peyton Manning and his group. Not to win 12 games and dominate the conference. None of that stuff.

To be fair, the Colts played a perfect first half and it is likely that no one in the league was going to stop them anyway.

“In spurts, we did well,” said Justin Tuck, “But in other spurts we didn’t.”
You would have liked to see some type of push back from the defense not to allow Manning and his offense to do anything they wanted for 30 minutes.

It would have been nice to see the Giants offensive line make a statement early in the game and control the line of scrimmage instead of finding themselves back on their heels on first and second down. This allowed for the Colts great pass-rushers Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis make a beeline for Eli Manning head with no regard for anything else.

We saw none of that.

What we see is still a team in search of its identity. Somewhere between the start of the 2009 season and now, their identity changed.

Internally, they still believe they are a run-first team. Perhaps it is simply machismo disguised as belief when the results continue to show a different result.
There is no doubt the 2008 offensive line would have had the Colts moving backwards. Instead, they were pushed around and turning back into the pass-first team they have been over the last year due in part to their inconsistencies in the running game.

“This is the NFL,” said left guard Rich Seubert. “It’s a long season. We’ll find a way to fix it and go from there.”

As we move along in this season, we will get a feel for the group mental sense. For now, the early conclusion we can draw is that Brandon Jacobs clearly is on his own planet.

Sunday night, he committed a personal foul penalty after an interception. Then on a running play, rather than follow blocks that were not to his liking, he attempted to reverse his field and the Colts defense shut down for no gain angering his head coach, adding to a litany of issues the enigmatic runner has been going through since training camp.

It did not stop there. In a fit of anger, Jacobs tried to slam his helmet to the ground and instead, it wound up in the hands of a fan ten rows into the stands that refused to return it. Coughlin did not see the incident.

“It was something that happened that shouldn’t have happened,” Jacobs said after the game. “I got frustrated and went to throw my helmet under the bench and it caught my middle finger and flicked up into the stands.”

Two games in and there are already questions about the Giants resolve. After last season’s bloody beating by the Saints, every assumed that the team would rebound and it never happened.

They dismissed it and their season eventually dissolved. The Colts took a beating last week in Houston, and while many wanted to write them off, they were silly to do so.

The Giants lost that equity last season, and that is why they have not earned the benefit of the doubt this time under proven otherwise.

This goes for both sides of the ball. It certainly is not for a lack of talent. There are issues they need to address and clean up before they can establish to the football world that they are a contender. Lucky for them, the other NFC East teams will give them several weeks to do so.

“You just learn from it,” said Eli Manning. “It goes down as a loss. We’re 1-1 right now. Everybody in the division is 1-1, except Dallas is 0-2 obviously. We’re not in a bad spot.”

All they can do is learn because right now they simply are not ready to step up in weight class yet.