Just Another Bump in the Road…
By SuperFan
I’m not going to lie to you – that one really stung. Not just because it was against the Eagles (at home), or because it was a divisional game. No – I’m most upset because now all those people who said the whole Plaxico situation was going to be too much of a distraction will walk around believing they were actually right. Damn!
Of course having Plaxico on the field would have helped, but please don’t think for a second that that’s the reason we lost Sunday’s game. They may have only scored twenty points, but our defense still let Philly’s offense completely dominate. When some higher power reached down right before halftime and gave us that blocked-FG return for a touchdown, cutting the deficit to 10-7, I thought we’d have all the momentum in the world to take over that game in the second half.
Unfortunately, it’s really hard for an offense to build any kind of momentum when they only get SIX PLAYS in the entire third quarter!! Plaxico’s absence had NOTHING to do with our defense being unable to get off the field. And I don’t care what Antonio Pierce was going through: there’s no way he could ever catch Brian Westbrook one-on-one. It’s just not physically possible.
Plus, and I don’t mean to play the “what-if violin” for too long here, if Hixon makes that catch on the deep post route, well, we’re talking about a completely different game. In fact, several receivers were dropping passes Sunday. In all fairness, however, Plax had made his fair share of drops this season as well. Bottom line, dropped passes happen – they’re a part of the game. We’ve got to accept it and move on.
Let’s not forget, we’ve been very spoiled fans this season. Out of the thirteen we’ve played so far, this is only our second bad performance. When I was freaking out (ironically enough, RIGHT before the blocked-FG-touchdown-play), my little brother had to calm me down via text messaging. What he wrote was, “relax, man, it’s only thirty minutes of a season.” And then our touchdown happened. To apply his wisdom a little further, last Sunday was only sixty minutes of a season. All-in-all, after seven hundred eighty minutes of football the Gmen have played this year, they’ve played poorly for only one hundred twenty of them. That means we’ve got about an eighty-five percent awesomeness rate thus far this season! Hey, it’s all in the numbers.
While it wasn’t the way most fans would have liked for it to happen, we did walk away from this football weekend NFC East champs. Yeah, that’s right, we won the division! Actually, I’d always love it if a Cowboys’ loss results in our winning the division. But still, a W would have done even more for us. Barring some huge catastrophe, I’m still pretty positive about our chances to clinch that #1 seed for the playoffs, regardless of how well Carolina played Monday night (that’s really going to be quite a match up on December 21st, huh).
What I came out of the last game most concerned with was Jacobs’ knee. Hopefully he’ll be okay. He is a monster, after all.
I’d compare this game to either the Minnesota or (second) Washington game last season. Late in the year, overall bad performance, and now we have to get right back up and start playing hard again. And don’t you dare think Coach Coughlin will take this loss lying down. No way. I have a feeling he’ll get our players incredibly fired up for this Sunday’s match-up against Dallas. What better way to rebound from an ugly divisional loss than to get to play another one the very next week?! And who better to make a statement against than the Dallas Cowboys?! A big win against the ‘boys this week will surely remind everyone who the best team in the league (still) is.
So pick your heads up, fans! Big game coming up! And please keep the e-mails coming, to gmensuperfan@gmail.com. Until next week, GO GMEN!!
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