NFL

Boo York, Boo York! Battle of the beaten

PHILADELPHIA — So this is how the coaches of your football teams kicked off our weeklong Countdown to The Big Game: one looking like he’d been rolled under a Zamboni, one looking like he’d just bid farewell to the family pet.

“I can’t say it any more bluntly,” Tom Coughlin said after peeling himself out from under the ice smoother, and after digesting the 23-10 beatdown the Redskins laid on his team. “I expected more.”

“A horrendous performance by us,” Rex Ryan grumbled about three hours later, bags the size of calzones under his eyes after witnessing the ghastly 45-19 plundering the Eagles slapped on his team. “That was about as bad as it gets. Just a terrible performance.”

UPDATES FROM OUR JETS BLOG

JETS-EAGLES BOX SCORE

PHOTOS: EAGLES ROUT JETS, 45-19

All right, everyone! Who’s ready for some New York-New York football in six days? Anyone? Anyone? How about the quarterbacks?

“Disappointed,” Eli Manning said, describing his three-interception afternoon. “Upset.”

“Not good,” was how Mark Sanchez defined his two-interception, one-fumble evening. “Terrible football.”

UPDATES FROM OUR GIANTS BLOG

GIANTS-REDSKINS BOX SCORE

PHOTOS: REDSKINS BEAT GIANTS, 23-10

Yes, this isn’t exactly the way we would’ve scripted the start to this week when, for the first time ever, the Giants and the Jets will tangle this late in a season with these kind of stakes. Right now, in the immediate afterburn of such a dreadful shared day, next Saturday’s game sort of feels like the NIT. And it’s terrible to slander the NIT like that.

Slowly, of course, we will recover, and we will reassemble what now, ironically, thanks to the very fact that both teams were so dreadful yesterday, really is the first football Armageddon of its kind that we’ve ever had. Wins yesterday, as it turns out, would have given both teams a cushion on Christmas Eve.

Now, that pillow is in tatters.

Now, the Giants need to win, or else rely on the Eagles to beat the Cowboys, and as good as the Eagles looked in ransacking the Jets, you probably don’t want to rely on them when you absolutely, positively have to (and what self-respecting Giants fan wants to actually root for Philadelphia?).

Now, the Jets need to win, and then win again in Week 17, if they want to stop relying on crazy breaks to keep falling their way, the way it happened yesterday when the Lions went 98 yards in two minutes to beat the Raiders, or the way the 0-13 Colts stepped up to beat the Titans.

Now, we can have a separate conversation about whether either team would honor a playoff berth if either earned one (although right now the Jets would play a first-round game against Houston and its depleted lineup, and the division-winning Giants would play a home game against either the Falcons or the Lions, and does anyone really believe both teams wouldn’t have a wonderful chance to win that first weekend?) …

But we digress.

Let’s deal with the misery at hand.

Let’s celebrate the Giants’ tight-knit defensive corps sniping at each other (Antrel Rolle: “If you’re going to go out here and play the game on Sunday, you need to be out there with your men throughout the week”; Justin Tuck, Rolle’s obvious target: “It’s easy to be tough when you’re doing it with somebody else’s body.”)

And let’s salute the Jets’ Santonio Holmes, who lost one fumble that was returned for a touchdown let a ball slip through his hands in the red zone for an interception that set up another, and earned a 15-yard unsportsmanlike flag for doing his childish airplane touchdown dance at a time the Jets were losing by 19 points. Asked if that was his worst day as a pro, Holmes shook his head.

“No,” he said. “My most inconsistent.”

Actually he was completely consistent, earning the Knucklehead Triple Crown, standing out on a day when it really should have been hard to pick one culprit in the seven-hour buzz kill that was New York football yesterday. We’ll recover, sure. There’s too much at stake Saturday, too much history.

“You want to own your town,” Ryan said. “Everybody’s going to put all their chips in and we’re going to see what happens.”

We will see. And we will watch. Even if, after yesterday, both sides of the great divide may wish to do so with one eye closed.