EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) -Carolina was better than the New York Giants for much of Sunday night’s showdown for home-field advantage in the NFC.
The Giants won because they learned how to win during their Super Bowl run last season. Never mind that they were behind 21-10 at the half and trailed from the time Carolina took a 7-3 lead in the first quarter until late in regulation.
“I’ll use one word: resilience,” said Derrick Ward, who had 215 yards rushing, including runs of 51 and 14 yards in overtime to set up Brandon Jacobs’ 2-yard TD that gave New York a 34-28 victory. “Coach (Tom) Coughlin has been telling us about being resilient. So we got back to playing fundamental football.”
The biggest thing to know about these Giants is that they hate being favorites. That’s what they weren’t last year when they won the Super Bowl, but it’s what they were for the first 12 games of the season, when talking heads, bloggers and “pollsters” had them as one of the two best teams in football.
retirement while Dallas was all but ceded a berth in Tampa.
But they came into Sunday night’s game after losing to Philadelphia and Dallas and now Carolina was the anointed team. “They’ve been the best team in the league over the last eight games, averaging 29 and a half points a game” Coughlin said, always ready with the stats.
For a long time, the Panthers were better.
Their two-back tandem, D’Angelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart, was outplaying Jacobs and Ward. And their defense seemed to know too many times just what Eli Manning and the New York offense was about to do, especially on several critical third-down plays. That included a third-and-1 in which fullback Madison Hedgecock was stuffed on his first carry of the season.
But as the Meadowlands’ wind started blowing harder, the Giants began to get into their rhythm.
In this case, the rhythm was Jacobs pounding his 260-plus pounds on the defensive line to soften it up, then Ward bursting through, often on shotgun draws, to eat up huge chunks of yardage. They were the big plays that are difficult to produce through the air when the winter wind is swirling around the Meadowlands.
“In the third quarter, we had some plays,” Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme said. “We were trying to take some shots down the field. The way the wind was blowing didn’t give us too much of an opportunity.”
ever come close to the numbers his brother puts up playing in a dome in Indianapolis. But it is also why New York running backs – from Tiki Barber to Jacobs and now to Ward – sometimes put up astounding numbers.
Ward’s were breathtaking: 215 yards on 15 carries, an average of 14.3 yards per carry after gaining 64 on 14 carries as the primary back when Jacobs sat out the Dallas game. And as he noted, it was possible because Jacobs was back to soften up the Carolina defense – he had 87 yards on 24 carries with three touchdowns.
There’s also the matter of the quirky nature of this season’s NFL.
The Panthers-Giants game was very similar to the Steelers-Titans game in Nashville – the Giants and Titans, 1-2 or 2-1 all season, had fallen on hard times and were being written off by the folks whose job is to chatter or write 24/7 about who the best team is at any given moment. In their place were the Panthers and Steelers.
Then the Titans disposed of Pittsburgh 31-14 and New York used its tried and true survival tactics, honed a season ago, to come back against Carolina and seize the home-field advantage it was supposed to have clinched several weeks ago.
“Give them credit. They battled back and made the plays they had to,” Delhomme said. “They beat us. That’s why this game is so much fun. One side is excited. The other is totally devastated.
“That would be us.”
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