Ji'nts vs. Iggles

That scream you heard yesterday was my Uncle Bill.  He's the Giants fan in the family.  The rest of the Mannion clan spreads their football loyalties all over the map.  One of my nephews even roots for Tampa Bay.  He can't explain it and we don't make him try.  The point here is to assure my Philadelphia-area readers that my feelings towards the Eagles are kindly, unlike my feelings towards the Phillies.  I was rooting for the Giants yesterday, but out of old habit, and now I'll be rooting for the Eagles to win the Championship and the Super Bowl.

I can do this because, while I like football, I'm not much of a fan.  I don't follow it week in and week out so there are things I don't know and questions I'd like answered, like:

Is Tom Coughlin nuts?

I'm not talking about burning the time out for the challenge, which was bad enough, a case of wishful thinking beating out judgment.  I'm talking about his going for it with no better plan in mind if he lost than having Eli Manning walk standing up into the Eagles' defensive line and hoping Brandon Jacobs could push him through like a piece of furniture stuck in a doorway.

Ok.  Maybe Manning wasn't supposed to go about it quite so nonchalantly.  Actually, from the look of it, I got the impression Manning didn't know how to go about it at all.  He appeared to have no idea how to run a quarterback sneak.  He's not exactly built for them.  Maybe he'd never been asked to run one since high school and was out of practice.  You would think, though, that's something his coach would know about and take into consideration.

We can debate all day whether or not he should have called for any play at all.  Down by 9 with all that time left, might have been better to kick it away and hope to go get the ball back quickly in good field position.  But there had to be a better play to call than to have Eli Manning stroll into the arms of Brodrick Bunkley and the rest of the Eagles defensive line who'd been playing all day as if they'd decided that the Giants could have sent a Hummer at them, they'd have stopped it.

That was more of a rant.  Here's a real question.

The Giants had all of December to get used to the fact that Plaxico Burress was their passing game and adapt.  But you have to have the manpower to adapt with.  Back when they were going 11 and 0, was Burress, the threat of him, the basis of their running game too? 

Obviously, it's tough to run against the Eagles, particularly if they're not worried about what might happen in the air, but was what I saw yesterday it?  Send Brandon Jacobs straight up the middle and count on all six feet four, two hundred and sixty-four pounds of him punching a hole in the line for two yards here, two yards there?  They've got nobody who could take it outside?  Is that really how they got to be the number one rushing team in the NFL?

Oh well.  The Eagles played a great game.  Manning and Coughlin are going to come in for too much criticism (Lance says hypocritically) in Giantsland without enough credit being given to Philadelphia.  As I said, though, I'll be rooting for them.  I'm not an Eagles fan, myself, but we have three others in the house, and we're all Donovan McNab fans.  We joined up when he and we were back in Syracuse.  And I think there should be a McNab exemption to certain penalty calls, like the one for unsportsmanlike conduct for the phone call.

The game needs to cherish its eccentrics.

Comments

[MB]

Howdy Lance! Glad to see you're still on top of anything you choose to review. Very few stories or reports I've read or watched saw it the way I did and you described; Philly was great, but the Giants .. WTF were they thinking??? Unexpectedly bad coaching lost that game.

Which is fine by me. Even though I too am a McNab fan, I always root for my rivals, and this year the AFC is All About my own Browns' North Division. Err... sans my own Browns... of course. {sigh} Go {shudder} Stealers!

Happy New Year!

[D.R.Scott]

Donovan McNabb is one of the good guys in jockstrap nation. Although it's better than it was, it still ain't easy being an African-American quarterback. As with Jackie Robinson in baseball, you gotta be better than anybody else.

From the first day in the NFL when he was booed for not being Ricky "Don't bogart that joint")Williams to struggling from attacks by idiots like T.O. and Rush Limbaugh, he's kept his sense of dignity and kept being the best player on a badly-coached team.

I want to see McNabb win the Super Bowl if only to hear what hallucination Mr. Oxycontin babbles before his head explodes.

[Sunny Jim]

Hi Lance - Happy New Year too.

The issues surrounding Burress are also interesting. With a multi-million dollar salary and the financial means to hire a personal bodyguard if he wanted to, what was Plaxico Burress doing with a loaded gun in his pocket as he was out having a drink in a nightclub? What was it in his upbringing or past experiences that drove him to think in those terms, i.e. "I can't go to such a place unless I have this protection"?

Reportedly, he was affected by a recent gunpoint holdup of a teammate.

Have we reached a point in which there are sections of our society in which gun violence is a now-permanent part of the landscape? If so, how has that affected the thinking of people who have been born and raised in those areas?

I recently saw a discussion on a hiking forum in which the question was asked: Is the Appalachian Trail a safe place? In 70 years, how many instances of gunpoint assault have ever been reported on any of its 2,000 miles? It was interesting to me in that I have hiked parts of the trail countless times and that question never occurred to me. I never felt the need to ask it.

[J]

The Stillers will kick the Eagle's collective asses in the Super Bowl, right after we send the Ballmore Ravens back home. Having predicted that, I am sure it's going to be a great game.

[Shayera]

Lance, that's exactly why I root for the Eagles. As a former resident of Baldwinsville, NY, I always root for teams who pick up SU alumni. And it isn't even as if I went to SU. It's all those years of sitting in the Carrier Dome watching mens lacrosse.
So go Iggles!