NFL

Little hope remains for defending champions

BALTIMORE — It can be a players strike, or it can be a head coaching change, or it can be a star player shooting himself in the leg. Or it can be a team that no longer knows how to play big in the big moments, a team that forgets how to finish a game and a season and can only stand by helplessly as the bridge it was building, the bridge from Super Bowl XLVI to Super Bowl XLVII, is blown up in front of it.

Repeat after me: There will be no repeat again for the New York Football Giants.

Tom Coughlin’s Giants have crumbled all around him.

And he is clueless as to why, and how.

They have not yet been eliminated, but they left M & T Bank Stadium wearing the unmistakable look of Dead Champs Walking after Ravens 33, Giants 14.

And barring divine intervention from the football gods next week, Coughlin will not be the first coach in Giants history to successfully defend a Super Bowl crown.

Which makes this a Bury Christmas at worst, a Blue Christmas at best, in Big Blue New York.

The Giants’ playoff hopes can be summed up this way: A Win (over Eagles) and a Prayer (losses by Bears and Vikings and a Cowboys loss or tie).

“I take full responsibility for this team,” Coughlin said.

As well he should.

He told his shell-shocked players as much as well.

“He took it all on him,” Jason Pierre-Paul said. “But really it’s not him that’s playing the game. He can’t suit up and put pads on. That’s us. It’s really not him to blame.”

But Coughlin sounded as clueless as anyone has ever heard him sound during his nine-year reign.

“What has happened over course of the last couple of weeks is very difficult to explain,” Coughlin said.

Then he tried to explain it.

Tried to explain why Joe Flacco (25-36, 309 yards, 2 touchdowns) resembled John Unitas. Tried to explain why Elite Eli Manning (14-28, 150 yards, 1 touchdown), stripped naked without a running game, was anything but elite. Tried to explain why his once-feared pass rush went sackless. Tried to explain why his marshmallow run defense surrendered 224 yards.

Tried to explain why diminished Hakeem Nicks was targeted only three times and caught as many balls as Amani Toomer did. Tried to explain why Corey Webster resembled Bill Parcells’ cornerback Elvis Patterson, whose nickname was Toast because he was burned so often, against Torrey Smith.

Yearned wistfully for a redux of Victor Cruz’s 99-yard touchdown a year ago against the Jets, something, anything, that would spark his lifeless team.

“Whatever it was, it really invigorated our team … and we gained in confidence, and we’re not a very confident group right now,” Coughlin said. “It’s one of those things in any profession that you have to earn the confidence. You just don’t talk about it.

“Sometimes I get tired of talking, talking, talking. You do have to go on the field by yourself, 11 of you out there, because everyone else is over here [sidelines], and accomplish that. We’re certainly not doing that.”

But he knows full well that it’s his job to motivate his players to do that.

“There are a lot of proud guys in that locker room that are looking to me for answers,” Coughlin said, “and the answers are not easy.”

Defensive coordinator Perry Fewell tried a four-linebacker strategy to steam Rice and make Flacco beat them. So Flacco beat them.

“It was a little surprising, but you got to adjust,” linebacker Chase Blackburn said.

Manning had constant pressure in his face. “When you’re not playing your best, teams can come out and embarrass you,” Manning said.

Cruz (3-21) caught his first pass — a three-yarder, 20 seconds before the half. “They kept a safety over top, but it was a matter of just continuing to get myself open which I felt like I was doing, and just not getting the ball thrown my way,” Cruz said.

Once they were Road Warriors.

Now they are Road Kill.

“This is not the team that we are,” Antrel Rolle said.

Pierre-Paul will be the first to tell you that the team they are now isn’t a playoff team. “We pissed down our leg,” Pierre-Paul said.

“A team like this, with so much talent and so much ability on both sides of the ball, it’s kinda difficult to explain coming into a game like this,” Cruz said.

Bury Christmas.