|
|
| E-GIANTS By
DAVE KLEIN Disappointment? Make that a disaster. This team was supposed to be a division champion. It was not. This team was supposed to go deep into the playoffs. It did not. This team was supposed to be led by a brilliant young quarterback. It was not. This team seriously, sadly underachieved, and that is the unvarnished truth. Whether head coach Tom Coughlin returns or not is, for this particular moment, immaterial. What counts for a lot right now is the makeup of the team, the losses in personnel it will absorb and the search that will be conducted to determine replacement parts. The major replacement will be for running back Tiki Barber, whose long-ago proclaimed retirement finally took effect once the Giants' season ended. It is felt by some that young Brandon Jacobs, the 6-4, 265-pounder, will be his replacement, felt that he can do the job. On the other hand, others feel he is at best a part-time player, a short-yardage, goal-line power runner who, the whispers go, doesn't really like to be hit. Center Shaun O'Hara will become a free agent, and he has reportedly said, through his agent, that he wants a new contract worth $3 million a year. If that is his final decision, then the Giants will be searching for a new center, too. The problems, personnel-wise, were due to injuries and inefficiency. There are healthy players who must be replaced; there are injured players who, if they do not heal, must be replaced. It is going to be a long and arduous job. It will be a job that cannot start until a new general manager is hired, because the 10-year fixture in that position, Ernie Accorsi, has retired. It was his intention to leave when the Giants' season ended, and yesterday it ended, in the rain and the darkness and the near-isolation of Lincoln Federal Field. The Giants have not decided on their next general manager. There are several names, ones you have heard and ones that will be surprising as the days develop. Suffice to say that there is enough opposition to Chris Mara, the team's personnel evaluator, because of his last name, because his older brother John is the team's President and Chief Operating Officer, because the other "family" in a position of ownership, the Tisch family, does not especially like the idea of a Mara running the business of the team and another Mara running the personnel. Yet it was, ironically, exactly that formula that guided the Giants for four decades, when Jack Mara was in charge of the team's business and Wellington, his younger brother, was in charge of personnel. That won't happen again. The Giants are no longer a single-family entity. So there will be a new general manager and among his first assignments will be decisions on the new running back, the future of more than a handful of veterans, the condition of the older injured players and, if things are done right, the decision on whether to keep Coughlin or find a new man. A younger man, perhaps? A college coach, perhaps? There is a need for assistant coaches who coach on the field and not through film and textbooks. Eli Manning is a quarterback without direction, a quarterback with talent and skill but he appears lost -- a deer caught in the headlights of an on-coming truck -- and will continue to appear that way until someone comes along to rescue him. It is way too soon to pass judgment. The season has just ended. Time is the ingredient most needed for now, and then will come reason and logic. But there is talent here. The Giants scored a fourth quarter touchdown when faced with a first-and-30 situation, and Coughlin referred to that, perhaps with some anger. "Let's face it, we had first and 30," he said. "We still got a touchdown. Who wants to talk to me about that one? Let's not lose track of the good things, as well. I know we are in a mood and we have been that way for most of the year, where it's all negative, but it's not all negative." It is surprising just how tired statements like that can become. Coughlin is super-sensitive to criticism, constantly deflecting such questions and asking, instead, that everyone focus on the positives. Well, there are few positives -- excluding occasional plays and individual performances -- in a losing season, and when the Giants lost their wild-card game yesterday, they finished with a losing season. But the Giants were in the playoffs last season, and they were again this season. Neither appearance was memorable. Last year, at home, it turned into a 23-0 throttling by Carolina. Yesterday it was closer, could have gone to overtime, but still a defeat. In the final analysis, the Giants allowed the Eagles to move 46 yards in five plays at the end of the game. That is unacceptable. Of those 46 yards, 33 of them were contributed by halfback Brian Westbrook, who as usual tormented the Giants' defense. "I thought we were going to play better [in that situation]," Coughlin said. "We started off by giving them decent field position on the kickoff but I thought we were going to play better against the run and that we would stop them. But we didn't." Is that enough reason to fire him? Probably not, but an accumulation of small things -- wasted minutes on the clock, unwise timeout calls, dreadful play-calling -- can in fact turn into reason enough. "I told our guys I was proud of them" Coughlin said. "I think they demonstrated a great concept of team this year, through the bad, they hung together. There never was any quit. I honestly thought the game would go into overtime. I didn't expect them to come down the field and be in position to kick a field goal. I also told our team that the great lesson is, obviously, not to waste timeouts." For that line alone, he should be dismissed. Check out Dave's website at E-GIANTS
where you can subscribe to his newsletters which
run much more frequently than what is available here. NEW - Send a request to davesklein@aol.com for a free week's worth of news!
| ||||||||
|
Stop
in and visit "Mike's
Keys to the Internet" |
| |