Week # 4: The Real Osi !!!

First let me start off by saying I HATE 8pm games. I hate them because the ruin your day and they don't start until 8:25pm, which means you don't get in your door until after 1am. Thankfully the Giants prevailed, so all is well in our lives.

On a night where most skeptics felt that the win over Washington was an abberation and the Eagles were going to hand us our lunch, nobody went home disappointed. That is of course if you were a Giant fan. Sadly plenty of seats were occupied by Eagle fans or more specifically people who yelled "Giants suck". You see Eagle fans not only see the glass half empty they see cracks in the glass that will eventually lead to an apocolypse.

I had the good fortune to attend the game with my online buddy Gary, a devout Eagle fan. Gary drove all the way up from South Jersey and braved traffic on the Garden State Parkway to see his beloved E-A-G-L-E-S. By the end of the 3rd he was gone. He had had enough. In fact many other Eagle fans left the game early, most with an escort from security. It's funny but almost everyone of them left with a bottle of beer in one hand and their middle finger held up on the other. Gary to his credit left like a man. He is the classiest Eagle fan I know.

My other cohorts included Howie Fortel, my normal partner in crime in Section 311 and my buddy Jim Day, who tells everyone he's a "Dolphin fan who roots for the Giants". Don't ask me what that's all about. Howie was excited, and why not ? We were treated as Gary said to, "a throwback NFC East game from the 80's, that only a Giant or Eagle fan could watch".

I watched and enjoyed every bit of it. On a night where the Giants honored their famed "Crunch Bunch" as honorary captains the defense played inspired ball. For those of you too young to remember the Crunch Bunch was the nickname for the Giants linebacker corps from the mid 70's to the mid 80's. #55 Brian Kelley, #10 Brad Van Pelt, #53 HOF'er Harry Carson and of course the greatest Giant of the all LT !!! It was great seeing LT at the Meadowlands again. He looked great and one can only hope he's living clean.

The Giants D fed off the crowd from beginning to end. I believe the Eagles got into the Red Zone once. All they could muster was a long FG in the 4th quarter to break the shutout. Donovan McNabb was sacked more times than Rome was by the huns !

The obvious defensive star of the game was OSI Umenyoria, who abused the Eagles rookie LT. I won't mention the kid's name here out of respect for him. Osi had 6 sacks and looked like a

young Deacon Jones. It's awful hard to double team anyone in the Giants pass rush when they are all healthy. I dare teams to put 2 guys on Strahan. If they do Osi will have the single season sack record all to himself even with Brett Favre stumbling.

Speaking of sack records, Michael Strahan broke LT's all time Giants sack record. I'm going to go on record here as saying that the record really isn't the record. The NFL didn't officially start counting sacks until 1982. This means that LT lost out on 9 1/2 sacks from his rookie season, since they weren't "official". This is actually a joke. The NFL makes billions of dollars every year. You'd think they could spend a few thousand of it to have some college intern or low level accountant count every sack ever recorded off of the play by play boxscores off of all the games played and possibly watch the film from every game since 1950, which they do have.

My bet is that guys like Deacon Jones or Gino Marchetti or even former Giant great Andy Robustelli might have a legit claim to the record. Major League Baseball, which normally plays second fiddle to the NFL actually retro-ed Saves to every pitcher who earned one going back to the early 1900's. All they did is review the boxscores. The NFL owes this to all of us who love our stats and all the old-timers who really made this game what it is.

The funniest thing is that Deacon Jones, the man who coin'ed the phrase "sack", doesn't even have 1 official sack credited to him during his 13 year career. Stop the insanity and give credit where credit is due !!!

Ok...let's move on to the offense. Since the defense played a near flawless game I have to pick on something. The final score was 16-3 and it should have been 27-3. Let's credit Eli with a terrible pick in the red zone to snuff out a great drive in the closing minutes of the first half. Eli said, "I just made a bad throw". Eli, we watched the game and you made a great throw. Unfortunately it was made in the direction of a guy wearing a white and green jersey. The second half looked to me like the offense was just trying to not mess up anything. They seamed to be totally content to let the D dominate the game.

Special teams...Looked great if you can discount the kicking game. This team is in depearate need for a field goal kicker. Right now we've got a retread who can't even make extra points let alone 35 yard chip shot field goals. Jerry Reese better start scouring the waiver wire in order to find some one who can kick or this team will lose 2 or 3 close one's.

One more note on the defense. 12 sacks...simply incredible when you realize it was done vs one of the more mobile QB's in the history of the game. I tend to think DMac's legs aren't 100% as evidenced by the play where he crossed the line of scrimmage and had a clear 10-12 yard avenue, but chose to throw the ball and wound up with a penalty (illegal forward pass). In the old days he would have tucked it in and ran for the 1st down. My guess is that the Giant D had him so off his game he just lost site of where he was.

Next week we get our crosstown rivals, the J-E-T-S ! It should be an interesting one !

See ya then !