Aaron Rodgers gets his chance Sunday night to put his money where his mouth was over the offseason, when he all but accused the Giants of breaking into Packers’ offices and stealing the Lombardi Trophy and whisking it out of Titletown, USA, under cover of darkness and renaming it the Coughlin Trophy.
Tonight, the “Talk is cheap, play the game” Giants get their chance for Pay-Rod, at a time when Big Blue is obsessed with resurrecting its killer pass rush.
“A couple of those guys on that team shared that sentiment. … It doesn’t really matter,” Chris Canty said of the Packers’ belief they lost the game more than the Giants won it. “I mean, at the end of the day, we were able to finish the drill and we got a Super Bowl ring and they didn’t last year. That war of words, so to speak, is irrelevant. That’s not gonna make a difference in this football game coming up.”
I say to Canty: Sometimes it does.
“Does it really?”he asks. “Let me tell you something: My experiences with that, that goes out of the window about the first part of the first quarter.
“Everybody’s got a plan till they get hit in the mouth. … All of that trash talking goes out of the window.”
Not all of it. Never all of it. Make book on this: If the Giants beat the Packers tonight and silence the irritant chatter about another second-half swoon, it will all of a sudden matter to them that Rodgers said this on Super Bowl Sunday in the wake of Giants 37, Packers 20:
“It was a big part of our game plan to try to speed the tempo up against them. Keep them on the field for longer drives. Do everything at the line of scrimmage. To combat that, there was a little bit of gamesmanship on their side.
“Some phantom injuries to try to slow us down and give them some time to recover during a couple of those drives.”
And there was this, from Packers linebacker Clay Matthews:
“We picked the most in opportune time to play our worst game. The fact is, [the Giants] didn’t beat us, we beat ourselves.”
Eli Manning apparently hasn’t lost any sleep over FlukeGate.
“Everybody has a way of keeping their confidence, and sometimes you just say. ‘Well, they didn’t beat us, we gave it to ’em.’ I don’t know why you’d do that in a playoff game. Hey, if that’s the way they want to think about it, that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t make me want to argue their point.”
Giants linebacker Spencer Paysinger worked out with Matthews at Pro Active in Agora Hills outside Los Angeles in the offseason, and they engaged in some good-natured ribbing.
“’Yo, you think you guys gave it to us?’” Paysinger recalled Matthews saying. “He was busting my chops about everything, but I just kept telling him, ‘Look at the game film,’ because anybody that watched that game film will know that we played a pretty good game. I don’t want them to take anything from us in terms of saying that they gave it to us, ’cause they didn’t give us anything. We outright won that game.”
Matthews said to Paysinger: “We were the best team in the league.”
“And I just kept saying, ‘Any given Sunday, you never know what’s gonna happen.’” Paysinger said.
The Packers A-Rod, unlike our local A-Rod, is elite, every defense’s worst nightmare,
“I think that’s why you get into this line of work.” Canty said. “You want to play against the best competition. In order to be the best, you gotta beat the best.”
What makes Rodgers unique?
“He’s one of those quarterbacks that can extend plays, extend drives with his legs as well as his arm,” Canty said. “When you look at it, they put so much pressure on him, so far as the production of the offense, but he just takes that all on and is just cool. … He’s in the pocket, he gets pressure, he gets out of the pocket, he makes the plays downfield with his arm, he runs with his legs, he keeps drives going, he keeps defenses on the field and he keeps opposing offenses off the field.”
Do you spy him?
“I’m not gonna say spy,” Giants linebacker Michael Boley said, “ but definitely you want to keep him in the pocket.”
Boley was asked his reaction to FlukeGate.
“Thank you,” he said. “If they gave it to us, they sure picked a wrong time to give someone a game.
“At that point in the year, you don’t give anybody anything. Everything that’s got is earned.”
These Giants are prideful champions, remember.
“No reaction whatsoever, we’ll see ’em on Sunday,” Osi Umenyiora said.
Pay-Rod Sunday.