A good week for the Giants. In fact a great week for the Giants. The two division rivals that were closest to the Giants in standings, tied for 2nd place at 4-1 coming into the weekend, both lost and are now 4-2. If Giants beat the Browns Monday night, they should be in pretty good shape. The tough part of their schedule is definitely coming up starting with the Steelers in week 8 so it is way too early to claim vitory, but they are definitely sitting pretty.
The reputation of the NFC East definitely took a hit this weekend. There were three games that matched up NFC E teams agaisnt NFC W teams and the NFC W won two out of the three. Cardinals beat the Cowboys, previously winless Rams beat the Redskins, and in the lone NFC E victory, the Eagles beat the 49ers in a game closer than the score indicated.
A few words about the Cowboys: I don't know how to explain this, but how is it possible that a qb throws for 320 yards, completes 2/3 of his passes, has 3 TDs and 0 INTs but still looks very ordinary? Well it happened yesterday. Romo completed 11 passes to Marion Barber on little dinks that evey college qb playing today could make. Barber broke one of them for a 70 yard TD inflating Romo's numbers. He hit one short ball to Crayton that he also broke for a long TD. The rest of the time, he looked like he was not handling the pressure well and just didn't look like he was doing anything special to move his club. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I think he is the most overrated player in football. He doesn't stink. He makes the throws he needs to make, I just think he's overrated.
I am sticking with my earlier contention that Wade Phillips is a terrible coach. Yesterday's game against Cardinals provided me with more ammunition. It's not that Cardinals stink - they don't. They have a lot of weapons on offense and played well on defense. But Cowboys lost the game giving up two special teams TDs - one on the first and one on the last play of the game - an opening KO return for a TD and a blocked OT punt to end it. Special teams play is 90% coaching. You need big, fast athletes to play on ST and certainly some teams have more ST freaks than others making them particularly good in that phase. But - when you're fielding 53 guys that are all world class athletes, every team has a sufficient number of great athletes to play decent special teams.... IF THEY HAVE DECENT COACHING.
Jim Fassel was coach of the Giants for 7 years or so and never got the ST right; they always were well below average. Coughlin came in and with largely the same group of athletes, fixed the ST in his first year. He is a very good findamentals coach. By contrast, Wade Phillips was the losing coach on the greatest ST swindle play in NFL playoff history, the "Music City Miracle", so he has a history of being bad ST coach. Yesterday's failures were just another example to add to the resume. I don't want to overplay it because sometimes teams make plays on ST against well coached ST of other teams. But still. Phillips is an incompetent HC.
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