It’s easier when you have won two of the past five Super Bowls for you to voluntarily bare your soul in broad daylight and point the finger of blame at yourself and admit from the time Lawrence Tynes’ 54-yard field goal fell short all the way to your Monday Mourning media mea culpa, you were Tom Coughlin, leading man in Sleepless in Blue Jersey.
“That’s the way we play,” Coughlin said. “We’ve been able to do that by virtue of putting the ball in the hands of the quarterback and having him make good decisions … and this one didn’t work out.
“Would we change? Yeah sure, today you would (chuckle). Today it’s easy.
“Got the ball at the 28, you run it once to the 26, run it again, put it in the middle of the field … but there’s no guarantees that a 44-yarder or a 46-yard field goal are going to be easily handled either.
“But, if I were to do it over myself, would I be as conservative with 15 seconds? Not this morning. This morning I’d throw it to the sideline or something of that nature, take a chance on that. What happens if you get a sack there? What happens if you try to fit one in tight, whether you catch it or not, you get tackled inbounds? Game’s over.
“And so, would I be that conservative? Not today. But [Sunday] night, I chose to do that, knowing full well the clock was not in our favor, we had no timeouts. I fully expected the type of coverage that would take the short throw to the sideline away from us. But I’m not going to know whether or not that was the case because we didn’t try it.
“So I take full responsibility for that, and as I told the players, ‘I’ll start the meeting off by talking about my sins,’ and that’s one that I’ll confess to.”
This was how Coughlin, standing behind a podium in the assembly room had begun his press conference, before one question had been asked. Talking about the ill-fated pass interference call downfield against Ramses Barden that deprived Tynes a chance to boot a 44-yard game-winner almost seemed cathartic for him.
“Put the blame right here, it’s right where it should be,” Coughlin said. “The game was in hand, we let it get out of hand. All the analysis afterwards is fine and dandy, and that’s what we all do for a living, me included — analyze, analyze, analyze, try to figure out where it went astray. It’s not hard to figure that out when you look at the total body of effort. But on the other hand, we were there to win the game and we didn’t get it done.
“And that hurts. It’s remorse for opportunity lost. And you see it in the eyes of the players today, you see it in the eyes of the coaches today.
“There wasn’t any sleep here because there wasn’t any sleeping. Soon as you laid down, it came right to you: ‘Why didn’t you win the game?’ It’s no fun when it doesn’t work out the way you planned it to work out.”
Coughlin talked about the subpar operation preceding Tynes’ miss before adding: “I don’t think he got his best foot into the play because of it. … It was probably, what, 2 , 3 yards short, which if we’d been able to pick up 5 yards, he would have been right on the mark.”
It is rarely a bad philosophy putting the game in Eli’s Manning’s hands, particularly at the end of games. But the best-laid plans of mice and Manning went awry following a draw play that gained only 1 yard when Barden was forced to prevent Nnamdi Asomugha from intercepting it.
“I grabbed him,” Barden said. “We both made contact, I probably made a little bit more according to the ref, but what’s done is done. You can’t give up interceptions. If maybe I could have a better release and wouldn’t have been in that position, but once it gets to that point, I’m not going to let anybody else catch the ball. Then there is no field goal.”
Manning felt badly for Barden and reiterated he should have back-shouldered the pass.
“Just could have put the ball in a better spot,” Manning said.
Barden felt badly for Tynes.
“It wasn’t fair to him to ask him to kick it that far,” Barden said.
If there were 17 seconds remaining, Coughlin and Manning would have considered one last play. Only 15 seconds with no timeouts was too risky. But the benefit of hindsight told Coughlin: So was taking a shot downfield.
“You see a lot of teams get to the 30-yard line then all of a sudden get conservative, and then you’ve got to kick a 48-yarder — those aren’t guaranteed as well,” Manning said. “If there was a circumstance where they were playing two safeties high and you had a chance to run the ball, maybe we would, but they weren’t. They had a safety down right in the box. It was going to be tough to run the ball. You might get a yard or two, but it would be tough to get more than that unless someone breaks a tackle.”
The bus ride back up the Turnpike was a quiet one. There is superior leadership on this team and always a sense of calm with this coach and this quarterback at the command of the two most critical positions.
“This is about as good a team as we’ve had since I’ve been around here,” Mathias Kiwanuka said.
What, the 2-2 Giants worry?
“We’re close,” Manning said, “and we’re not far off from being really good.”
Now go to bed, Coach.