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During Tom Coughlin's tenure, the Giants have won two Super Bowls when no one expected them to.
This is probably a good time to remind Giant fans, and over-enthusiastic analysts everywhere, that the fortunes of pro football teams can change in the blink of a hurried third-down pass or an ill-timed firearms discharge. The Giants are not sure things for New Orleans, or even probable things.
If there is another Super Bowl in their near future, it will arrive in its own due time, and likely reveal itself as another February surprise rather than a charted event.
Boasters beware: The Giants generally don’t achieve Super Bowls in any linear fashion. They fare best when jumping out of the bushes.
It was only 10 months ago, after all, that the Jets were considered the better team around here. Hard to believe now, considering the divergent paths. But going into their Christmas Eve game last December, the Jets at 8-6 seemed likely headed for a wild card berth after two successive AFC championship appearances.
The Giants, meanwhile, were dead in the water at 7-7, having dropped five of their last six. Rex Ryan was still calling the Jets, “Kings of New York,” and a lot of us were taking him seriously.
Again, that was less than a year ago. Then the Giants beat the Jets, 29-14, and thae Dec. 24 game changed everything, altering paths and perceptions dramatically.
“Given everything that was at stake, and all the noise that has been coming out of Florham Park, yeah, it means a little more,” John Mara said then.
Even the Giant owner didn’t know how much it meant at the time. In Oct, 2012, the Giants are now considered a dynasty and the Jets are deemed a crass joke. Eli Manning can’t do anything wrong while the Jets have devolved into a dysfunctional carnival, with Tim Tebow performing as a sideshow act and Tony Sparano as his miserly keeper.
Here’s the thing, though: that sort of double reverse may yet happen again. The Jets can become good, the Giants lousy. Maybe not this weekend, or next weekend, but certainly by January. A football season, by nature, is a very small sample size impacted enormously by one or two events.
If this Giant season resembles any other, at least so far, it would be 2008, the ultimate cautionary tale. That team was coming off a magical Super Bowl title and jumped off to an 11-1 start. The Giants were the clear favorites to sweep everything.
Then Plaxico Burress shot himself in a nightclub, a couple of injuries weakened the defensive secondary, and before we knew it the Giants dropped three of their last four regular-season games and were dumped quickly from the playoffs by Philly. The next season, the Giants went 8-8 and Tom Coughlin’s job security was in question.
The Giants became, briefly, what the Jets are now. Turned out, they were just reloading for another ambush two years later, in 2011. The Jets might be doing the same thing, in their own clumsy, irrational manner. We have no idea.
All of this does not mean it is a bad thing the Giants are playing well at the moment. It is always better to win than to lose. Manning is rescuing games as only he and Tom Brady seem able. Coughlin is a coach who can ride a hot streak and a hot quarterback. Enjoy the journey, but please remember: Coughlin’s Giants have never made a Super Bowl run when they were expected to do so.
They prefer to catch people by surprise.
Right now, they’re not surprising anyone. They’re merely looking like the best team in football.
Unless they lose to the undefeated Falcons in December by the exact score of 38-35 – the way they did to the Patriots in 2008 and the Packers in 2011 – we really shouldn’t expect too much from them.
And that’s when they’ll be most dangerous.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NydnRss/~3/YG0hqClzJPU/story01.htm
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