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Riotmaker
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: South Burlington, Vermont
Posts: 5,717
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Road Warriors
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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – Few NFL teams have enjoyed traveling as much as the Giants the last two seasons.
The Giants will look to finally knock off Bucs QB Jeff Garcia.
Since the start of the 2006 season, the Giants are 12-4 as the visiting team. They have won nine of their last 10 regular season road games, including their last seven in 2007, the longest one-season road winning streak in franchise history. The Giants, who are making their third consecutive postseason appearance, are the first team in NFL history to make the playoffs two years in a row despite having a losing home record in each of those seasons – because they are so successful playing in enemy territory.
On Sunday, the Giants face one of their most difficult road tests of the last two seasons when they battle the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Raymond James Stadium in an NFC Wild Card game. The NFC South champion Bucs were 9-7 overall and 6-2 at home this season. But those records could easily have been 11-5 and 7-1, because Tampa Bay lost its final two games to sub-.500 teams while resting many starters on both offense and defense.
The Buccaneers also own the defense that allowed the fewest passing yards, second-fewest total yards and third-fewest points in the NFL. They have a quarterback, Jeff Garcia, who has beaten the Giants twice in the playoffs, with San Francisco five years ago and with Philadelphia last season. Tampa Bay is also expected to present the Giants with a warm, sunny afternoon, which could create problems for a team that played its last five games in cold weather with occasional blustery and wet conditions.
But leaving New Jersey has been good to the Giants and they’re looking forward to this trip.
“I think we are excited about going on the road,” wide receiver Amani Toomer said. “We feel that, I don’t know for what reason, that we are better on the road than at home. I am glad we are getting a chance to play in some warm weather for a change.”
How’s that for turning a potential negative into a positive? That confidence comes from the success they’ve enjoyed in hostile environments. Since an opening night loss in Dallas, the Giants’ road trips produced victories in Washington, Atlanta, London (against the Miami Dolphins), Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Buffalo.
“We have played well on the road,” Coach Tom Coughlin said. “We have bonded together. We have good leadership, we have good character. We respond well to adversity. So that is a plus. That is something that we have stored in our memory bank. And hopefully we will plow our way right through. It is not going to be, obviously, easy. There are going to be those situations that will come up and hopefully we will respond the same way we have.”
“It is our warrior mentality,” defensive end Justin Tuck said of the Giants’ road success. “It seems like we play good or better when our backs are against the wall, so I hope we can continue that.”
They’ll have to if they are to reach their lofty goals. The Giants believe they have the talent to reach Super Bowl XVII in Phoenix. To do that they could have to win three road games and only two teams have ever done that to advance to the Super Bowl: New England in 1985 and Pittsburgh two years ago. Since the current postseason format was adopted in 1990, no NFC Wild Card team has played in the Super Bowl.
The Giants lost in the first round in each of the last two years, to Carolina at home in 2005 and at Philadelphia last year (a rare Giants road loss). But the current team is healthier than either of the previous two (though starters Shaun O’Hara, Kawika Mitchell and Sam Madison are all on the injury report), key players such as quarterback Eli Manning have important postseason experience and they enter the game with some momentum after scoring 73 points in their final two regular season games – with the offense, defense and special teams all getting into the act.
“It doesn’t matter what you did in ’06 and ’05,” linebacker Antonio Pierce said. “This is ’07, this is a different team, and hopefully on Sunday we can finally prove to everybody that this is a different team.
“I think when you go into the playoffs you look at the whole month of December and you look at how your team is healthy and if you are playing good football, solid, sound football, good defense, running the ball in that month and I think we did all those things well. We might have had some turnovers in certain areas but for the most part besides three or four guys that got hurt, which every team has, we are healthy, we felt like we played pretty well in the month of December, we played well on the road, and that is what faces us in the playoffs. If you look at all the positive things and you are making sure that you are working on your negatives, it is totally different from what last year felt like. I think everybody in the city of New York and in the NFL sees that and understands that.”
“I think we are a better team,” defensive end Osi Umenyiora said. “We know we are a better team. We have more healthy players. Last year we were decimated by injuries. This year we are just a lot more confident, I think.
“As a team I think we are more hungry. We are more focused because we have lost two playoff games in a row. We definitely don’t want to make it three.”
As with any game, this one is full of intriguing subplots. Here are some that have received the most attention this week:
*Manning’s quest for a playoff victory. Manning has won 29 regular season games in three years, but his postseason record is 0-2. In his two media sessions this week – one on a conference call, the other in the Giants Stadium press room – Manning was asked what a playoff win would mean to him and his career. The perception outside the team is that Manning must triumph in a game like this to elevate his standing among the league’s quarterbacks. But he absolutely refuses to personalize this game.
“I’m not looking for my resume,” Manning said in response to a question. “I’m looking for the Giants and taking this as far as we can and it starts on Sunday at Tampa against a good team.”
His teammates and coaches have also fielded many Manning questions this week and they have declared unequivocally that they support and believe in the quarterback.
“I feel good about him going in,” offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride said. “I think if we protect and the elements allow, I think he will play well. There’s no reason to think that the elements aren’t going to give him a chance to play well.”
“With him being in his third year of going to the playoffs, I think he will be a little sharper, a little crisper,” wide receiver Plaxico Burress said. “I just think he has changed as far as putting us in the right plays and basically just going out and going through his reads, going through his progressions, and not getting honed-in to one guy and spreading the ball around to everybody that is making plays catching the football. Nobody can really complain about anything.”
NOTES
*Defeating Garcia, who is 4-1 against the Giants. Five years ago, he threw for 331 yards and three touchdowns – and ran for a team-high 60 yards – in leading the 49ers back from a 38-14 deficit to a 39-38 victory over the Giants. Last season, he led the Eagles to a regular season victory in Giants Stadium, then repeated the trick three weeks later in a playoff game in Philadelphia.
So how do the Giants get Garcia off their backs?
“Win – win,” Michael Strahan said. “We played him what, twice already? In San Francisco they had the great comeback and last year in Philly they won by a field goal at the end of the game. Those years at this point don’t mean anything. He is with a totally different team, the third one, the third opportunity for us to try to defeat him and hopefully that is what we will do.”
*Ronde Barber. The brother of the former Giants running back has been his usual chatty self, offering his opinions on a variety of Giants. Regarding Manning, he told The New York Post, “he can be had, we know that.” Despite several prompts from the media, the Giants have declined to fire their own verbal shots.
“What I came to realize about the media and other players and things just being said is that it really doesn’t matter,” Pierce said. “He is on our opponent’s team so it doesn’t matter who said it or what name or what number. He's basically disrespecting the New York Giants in one way or another and on Sunday it will all go down.”
“I don’t care what Ronde says,” Strahan said. “That is his opinion. I love Ronde. Ronde is a really good friend of mine, but it really doesn’t matter. It is not going to make us play any harder. It is a game, I will hug him right after the game, and hopefully we will be the team that wins the game, but I think a lot more gets made out of that.”
Barber also had an interesting comment regarding Burress – which the receiver copied, highlighted with a yellow marker and taped above his locker.
“Plaxico is a kind of special athlete,” Barber said. “Not that he’s overly fast or real, like Randy Moss, athletic, because that’s just not his game. But he’s a (beast) to deal with.”
Burress seemed to think it was all pretty comical when he was surrounded today by reporters at his locker.
“You got to love that type of stuff,” he said. “I put it up so all my teammates can see what he thinks about me. All my teammates ask me so what you gonna do? Take it and we'll see what happens.
“It's fun to me, you can laugh at it, we can have conversations out there on the field and see who's winning.”
*Strahan’s last stand?
The 15-year veteran hasn’t said if he will play in 2008, but it’s possible that the final game of the Giants’ season will be the last of his career. That is no small detail considering no one has ever played more games in a Giants uniform and few have performed at such a high level for so long. But if there is a “let’s get to the Super Bowl for Strahan because this might be his last chance” bandwagon, No. 92 isn’t jumping on.
“I have no sense of urgency whatsoever besides winning the game,” Strahan said. “I don’t look at it and go, ‘if I don’t win it this year then…’ No - I am well past that. If you win a Super Bowl, it is because it is meant to be and that is the way the ball bounces for your team. When we went to the Super Bowl (in 2000) I never expected that to be the year that we were going to go and I am pretty sure if this year we go and we win the Super Bowl, it is just because that was in the cards for me as a player in my career and as a team and not so much for me looking at it personally to say, ‘you guys need to play better because this could be my last chance,’ or me even thinking that way. I don’t think like that.”
*The weather. In the last six weeks of the season, the Giants played in rain, snow and high winds. The temperature at kickoff was never higher than 52 degrees (which was in Buffalo, of all places, and it snowed in the fourth quarter). The forecast for 1 p.m. Sunday in Tampa calls for partly sunny skies and 75 degrees. Players not used to playing in the heat could be susceptible to cramping.
“We have talked about hydration all week long and about rest,” Coughlin said. “And it is one of those things – those are the conditions under which we are going to play just as we couldn’t do anything about the weather in Buffalo. So you are going to have to play through it.”
The players are looking forward to playing in warm weather on a soft grass field.
“I think the weather is going to be our best friend,” Burress said. “Last week was the first time that we really got some decent weather to throw the football in the past four or five weeks. Being able to go down and play in that type of weather, you know you have to take advantage of it and just go out, throw the football around, make some plays, and our running game can get going the way it has been doing the past few weeks to make us a better offense.”
“I can’t wait to get down there, to be honest with you,” Umenyiora said. “It’s entirely too cold around here. For the first time in my life, I’m happy to be playing a road game. We’ve played well on the road all year. I don’t expect that to stop this week.”
*Madison (stomach) and O’Hara (knee) did not practice today and are listed as doubtful. Mitchell (knee), cornerback Kevin Dockery (hip flexor) and defensive end Dave Tollefson (concussion) are questionable. Mitchell and Dockery were limited in practice, while Tollefson practiced fully. Burress (ankle), running back Ahmad Bradshaw (leg), tight end Michael Matthews (illness) and wide receiver Sinorice Moss (back) are probable. Burress was limited in practice.
The key injured players, of course, are starters Madison, O’Hara and Mitchell.
“Mitchell got limited work today and actually was working in a brace and he felt pretty good,” Coughlin said. “O’Hara did not work, Madison did not work.”
Asked if he thinks they can play Sunday, Coughlin said, “We will see.”
Madison said he has never had an injury to his abdomen until now.
“This is something of a rarity,” he said. “I’ve made a lot of progress. Hopefully, I can be out there with the guys. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Mitchell, who worked some on Wednesday and today, has the same attitude.
“I’m just trying to work through it,” he said of the sprained medial collateral ligament. “Everything we’ve tried so far has been good. I want to be out there for my team, myself and my family. We’ll see how I feel and how the knee feels.”
*With Madison and Dockery both hurt, it’s possible Corey Webster will start at cornerback for the first time since Sept. 23 at Washington.
“I am very, very confident that Corey… you know Corey is a guy who has played a lot of football here,” Coughlin said. “He has done a lot as a starter. He has come off the bench and played and helped us. He has played as a starter and if he does have to start, then I am very confident that he will do the job.”
*Gerris Wilkinson would start for Mitchell and Grey Ruegamer would step in for O’Hara if the usual starters can’t play. Both played the majority of last week’s game vs. New England.
“They played considerably and performed well,” Coughlin said. “I think that experience in itself gives them a lead into this game.”
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http://giants.com/news/eisen/story.asp?story_id=26504
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Road Warriors
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