by Jeb Kush

First off, the Giants lost this game because of their lackluster offense. Eli had a horrendous 5.7 average yards per attempt and it seemed like the Giants offense was terrified of attempting passes of more than 15 yards without Odell in the game. Eli threw a pick to go along with the stagnant performance, and the Giants couldn’t get anything going on the ground either. Paul Perkins was their leading rusher. Guess how many yards he had? 16. Oh, but that was probably on just a few carries, right? Wrong. He had 7 carries and ended the night with 16 fucking yards. This man averaged like 2.2 yards per carry. The absence of a running game was evident in terms of ball possession as well, as the Giants were only able to run 6 plays during the entire first quarter.

Now, the uninspiring running game was not all Paul Perkins’ fault as the Giants O-line looked horrendous. Eli was consistently pressured and the Giants rarely got any push on run plays. It didn’t help that Brandon Marshall and Eli were on the wrong page incredibly frequently. Marshall’s first catch occurred with less than a minute to go in the game. Manning and Marshall also both fucked up on two key third downs. On the first fuck-up, Marshall ran a deep curl route and started to work inside behind the closest linebacker but Manning thought Marshall was going to sit in the open zone behind the linebacker, and thus the ball was thrown behind Marshall and landed incomplete. On the second fuck-up, Marshall was wide open in the flat and Manning assumed he was going to turn up-field and basically convert his flat route into a wheel route. This plan came as a surprise to Marshall. Marshall never turned up-field and the pass was thus thrown behind him to the wrong shoulder and fell incomplete.