ARLINGTON, Texas – Son of a gun, he was going to pull this off. Of course he was. All night the Giants had played like they’d been introduced to the rules of football – and to each other – about 15 minutes before kickoff. They’d been sloppy. They’d been lazy. They’d been eight kinds of inept.
“Totally embarrassing,” is how the coach, Tom Coughlin, would put it.
And still here was Eli Manning, six points down, 52 yards away from the end zone, two minutes to work with and, son of a gun, he was going to make it all right again. He believed that. His teammates believed that. There were 85,348 shoe-horned into AT&T Stadium who surely believed it because they’d seen it, plenty, up close and impersonal.
“You think,” Eli would say, “that you’re going to win the game.”
Except this time, this night, would end as it had started, with banana peels littering the field, with a screen pass gone awry. On the game’s very first snap Manning had tried to flip one toward David Wilson – the start of a verrrrry long night for Wilson – and it wound up in DeMarcus Ware’s hands instead.
Now, with Wilson long banished to the bench thanks to two fumbles Eli targeted De’Rel Scott. Scott is exactly the kind of player Manning has empowered throughout his time as a Giant, a peripheral roster name now thrust into the glare, the way so many of Eli’s favorite targets have started. Except this time, the ball ticked off Scott’s arm, landed in the galloping breadbasket of Brandon Carr. Carr had nothing but open space in front of him.
Son of a …
“You can’t keep giving it to the other team,” Manning said.
It would end 36-31, a cosmetic score, made that way mostly because Manning remains the most dangerous quarterback on the planet when there’s nothing left to lose, when the playbook is in the dirt and the Giants simply ask him to keep finding Victor Cruz for touchdown passes.
That’s a dangerous way to live, of course, and an impossible way to win against any team of any reasonable pedigree, especially on the road. All night the Cowboys had stripped the Giants of their various weaponry with the same ease they twice stripped Wilson of the ball. Tony Romo roamed free all night and completed 36 balls. There were a couple of mindless personal fouls.
And, of course, all those turnovers.
“Six times!” Coughlin roared at game’s end. “Six times we gave the ball away tonight. You can’t win that way.”
Actually, that’s part of the problem: they can win that way, they have won that way, precisely the same way they nearly did Sunday night, by believing that when all else fails – and fails, and fails, and fails – there will always be Eli with time on the clock and a petrified defense in his sights. As fall-back plans go, it’s not a terrible one, and it’s worked out before.
Just not here. And there’s no guarantee it will work out next time, either. Because despite the limited sample size one 60-minute game offers, there are some troubling things worth worrying about already with these Giants, especially with the Broncos visiting Jersey next Sunday for the Manning Bowl.
There is the secondary sieve. There are Wilson’s buttery fingers – “Every time they touch you you’re gonna turn it over?” Coughlin asked incredulously – that are especially troubling because the Giants so badly need him to act the part of the reliable featured back at least as long as Andre Brown is on the shelf.
“I’m at the bottom now,” Wilson said. “No way to go but up.”
Most weeks, Manning can make up for a scad of sins by himself, but he wasn’t at his sharpest yesterday, even if you take the three picks out of the mix. And even then, there were those three scoring strikes to Cruz, and a 90-yard TD drive in the fourth that took less than 3 ½ minutes and put the Giants in position to crush the Cowboys’ spirit.
And then …
“You’re at midfield with a chance to win the game,” Coughlin said. “You have to win the game.”
Not this time. Even Eli couldn’t figure it out this time. Son of a gun, he came close, but even he can have a hell of a time trying to win a football game all by himself.