Greg Hanlon of CapitalNewYork.com knows it’s a hard sell.

Tiki Barber inhabits a kind of fan purgatory, a strange place for one of the Giants’ great players. As a broadcaster, Barber said some unflattering things about Eli Manning and Tom Coughlin — Barber wasn’t shy about criticizing Coughlin even when he was a player — and Giants fans haven’t forgotten.

Hanlon wrote: “Had the Giants not won the Super Bowl the year that he set himself against Eli and Coughlin, his comments would have had the chance to die down, and be shrugged off as a crass stumble for a newbie broadcaster. But the ‘controversy’ was still fresh when the Giants won, and thus” the fault lines remain.

Barber’s retirement as a running back, after the 2006 season, might have been bad timing for him, but he has said that it might have been the best possible timing for the team. From an interview with Bleacher Report in October:

If I played, I don’t think they would have went to the Super Bowl. Because the dynamics of the team shifted when I left, and Eli became that guy who had to take all the pressure on his back. And at the time, incorrectly, I didn’t think he could handle it. And that’s famously exploited in New York media. But he did, and that’s a credit to him. And I can do nothing but commend him because he’s done it multiple times over multiple years.

Some of Barber’s problems were self-inflicted wounds, as the other New York team might put it. He doesn’t seem like a person who’s easily humbled, but the collapse of his marriage and his TV career brought him low. It probably didn’t help that some people cheered his stumbles.

Hanlon:

His missteps have been gleefully met at each turn by collective false outrage, schadenfreude and thoughtless piling on. As for moral judgments, I’ll only say that like every other Giants fan, I venerate a certain defensive player from the ‘80s whose behavior has been far worse that Tiki’s. Ultimately, we have a choice when it comes to Tiki, between remembering the beautiful football player we were lucky to watch and joining the feeding frenzy.

Extra point Read the whole thing, and let us know if you think it’s time to move on.