NFL

Rolle: Giants face ‘must-win’ to avoid 0-3

No, it is not too early to label Sunday’s game against the Panthers in Charlotte, N.C., as a game the Giants absolutely, positively have to win. So says safety Antrel Rolle, who is not an alarmist, but is a realist.

“To start 0-2, although it is the beginning of the season is definitely not where I pictured us at this point in time,’’ Rolle said Tuesday on his weekly WFAN spot. “I think we’re a great football team. Us starting 0-3, this is a must-win game for us. I don’t care how you look at it, I don’t care who has to say what about it, this is a must-win game for us. We have to go out there and do whatever it takes to make sure we go out there and get a win in Carolina. They’re a great football team and they’re playing good football right now, although their record is also 0-2.’’

The Panthers are not a great football team, but they are a 1 1/2-point favorite, a sign of how far the Giants have fallen in the eyes of the oddsmakers. Rolle touched on a theme he’s hammered home before: The Giants do not play with enough aggression or swagger. Former Giants safety Deon Grant paid a visit to the team facility on Monday and Rolle spoke with his friend about this.

“It’s always great to get an opinion outside looking in,’’ Rolle said. “He said, ‘Antrel, even when you all make good plays, even when you are playing good football, it’s really not showing too much because there’s no excitement behind it. When a game is 41-23 or whatever the score was, it looks like you were getting blown out the whole game and that’s not the case.’

“Because there’s no level of excitement behind the great plays we were making throughout the course of the game. I just feel like as NFL players this is something we should love to do, this is something we should automatically get amped for, this is something we automatically should be excited to do come Sundays and right now on the sidelines, I’m just not seeing it, honestly. As a team we have to pick it up because there’s no one man without sin. That’s myself, that’s Eli [Manning], that’s [Justin] Tuck, that’s whoever you want to point a finger at. We all can make a difference and we all can make it better.’’

Rolle sounded a similar alarm down the stretch of the 2011 season and his rallying cry reverberated so loudly it helped the Giants surge to the Super Bowl.

“As a football team when we made our run in 2011 season, we had that,’’ he said “We went out there and played the Jets, we had that. We went out there and played Dallas, we had that. We played Green Bay, we had that, we had a certain level of swagger and a certain level of intensity that other teams they were like, ‘Holy crap, these guys mean business and they’re for real.’ It’s still early in the season. We still have time to fix it. Do we have too much time? Absolutely not. We need to get this fixed and we need to get it fixed now. And we will get it fixed. I’m extremely confident in our football team and the guys we have on this team. It will get fixed.’’

What Rolle sees is a disconnect between the quality of play the Giants show in practice and the product they put on the field on Sundays.

“If you see us in practice, we’re flying around, we’re making plays and everything is on point,’’ Rolle said. “When it comes to Sunday, it’s almost as if it’s a transfer of energy, it’s almost as if we lose ourselves a little bit. It’s a team effort. It’s all collective. We have to find a way we make sure we transfer whatever we put out there in practice to the game day come Sunday.’’