CRUZ DANCES AROUND TRUTH
Giant conspiracy theory a sad step by Victor
Victor Cruz is so desperate to regain his place among the elite receivers that he has become delusional.
He has turned his feel-good career with the Giants – undrafted local kid becomes big piece on Super Bowl championship team, even catches TD pass in Super Bowl — into bitterness.
Cruz unloaded on the Giants in an appearance this week on 105.1 FM’s The Breakfast Club by claiming they conspired to freeze him out of the offense last season to avoid letting him hit big incentives in his contract, making it easy to cut him in February.
He must have been reading out of the Tiki Barber playbook “How To Burn Bridges To East Rutherford And Destroy Your Giants Legacy.” Come on Vic, you’re better than that. “I felt it all year long,” Cruz said. “Halfway through the year I’m ballin’, the other half I’m not getting the ball. And you’re just like, ‘What’s going on?’ It was like, ‘Okay, I see what’s happening. They don’t want me here anymore.’ A lot of people probably don’t know this. Let’s say I played well, was a 1,000-yard receiver last year, it would have been more difficult from a fan perspective to cut me.” That’s about as dumb as people saying the Seahawks didn’t give the ball to Marshawn Lynch at the end of the Super Bowl against the Patriots two years ago because they didn’t want him to be Super Bowl MVP — so they instead tried a risky pass that was intercepted in the end zone, costing them the championship.
Cruz took a salary cut from the $7.9 million he was due to make in 2016 as part of a six-year, $45.9 million deal he signed in 2013 down to $2.4 million guaranteed. He was coming off two years of injuries. He was able to then make about $3 million in roster bonuses. Cruz made $28 million in seven years with the Giants, not bad for an undrafted free agent. He made almost $27 million in the last four years even though in 2014-15 he played a total of six games.
He was ineffective and a non-factor for most of last season. He suffered a torn patellar tendon in the sixth game of the 2014 season and missed the rest of the year, and then missed all of 2015 when he eventually needed calf surgery. He was not the same player anymore.
When he finally came back last year, he caught four passes for 34 yards in the season-opening 20-19 victory against the Cowboys. He caught the gamewinning 3-yard TD pass from Eli Manning with 6:13 left to win the game. It was a great story. Good kid, two terrible injuries, scores the game-winner against the team he grew up rooting for in New Jersey. It doesn’t get better than that.
As it turns out, that was indeed the best it got for Cruz. He didn’t score again and finished the season with 39 catches for 586 yards. But it was not because Ben McAdoo marginalized Cruz in the offense so he didn’t hit his incentives and cost the Giants a bunch of money. Cruz was just too easy to cover.
“If I played well, they owed me a ton of money that next year (2017),” Cruz said. “So it was like, ‘Let’s get Cruz off the books.’”
I’m not saying that never happens in the NFL. But the Giants were already limited on offense with
Odell Beckham Jr. being Manning’s only reliable target. Cruz’s issue was he was beaten out by rookie Sterling Shepard for the slot job and McAdoo played him out of position split out wide.
Not soon after the interview, and Cruz’s comments made their way around the internet, he took to Twitter for some damage control.
“I love the @Giants, they gave me a platform no one else did. I am forever grateful! I never said I was sabotaged, don’t believe these headlines.”
Sorry Victor, you can’t stuff this back inside the horse.
Cruz is 30 years old, and may not have much left. But the Bears are the team willing to find out after reportedly signing him to a one-year contract.
It’s just a fact of NFL life that injuries change everything. Cruz had been replaced by Beckham as the go-to guy for Manning.
When Cruz was making a name for himself in the NFL in his first three full seasons – 241 catches, 3,626 yards, 23 touchdowns, numbers comparable to Beckham’s first three seasons – he did most of his damage out of the slot. He is not fast, but he’s shifty. He was impossible to cover out of the slot and he and Manning developed great chemistry.
But when he lost the slot job to Shepard, he lost his edge. McAdoo clearly thought Shepard was more dangerous inside than Cruz. I don’t think a rookie coach trying to prove himself and win as many games as possible is playing Cruz out of position to save the Giants money. He didn’t have the speed to get separation from corners or the size or jumping ability to outmuscle them for 50-50 balls.
For a while, Cruz was making one big play a game but then started to lose playing time in the second half of the season to Roger Lewis and Tavarres King. Cruz caught three passes for 30 yards in the playoff loss to the Packers, which turned out to be the final game of his Giants career.
When Cruz was asked if he thought Manning was in on the devious plot, he left it open to interpretation how he really feels.
“It’s hard to believe. Even just to think about someone coming up to the quarterback and saying, ‘Hey, don’t throw it here’ or ‘don’t give it to this guy’ — it’s hard to even fathom that thought. Which I don’t even know or think happens. I doubt it,” Cruz said. “But when you look at the film and look at how it goes down, it’s the only way.”
Cruz will forever be a Giant, but now that he’s accusing them of plotting against him, he might have to wait some time to get into their Ring of Honor. @LanceMoore16