Oh Guru, where are you?

Ben McAdoo said last Monday night that we were supposed to put his team’s loss to the Lions at home on him. It sounded good, and accountable, when he said that. It always does when coaches or managers say things like that in sports after a bad loss for their teams. McAdoo didn’t mean it. The guys in charge hardly ever do.

In the same media conference, of course, the guy in charge of the Giants went out of his way to blame a couple of his team’s worst moments in the game on the most important offensive player the Giants have ever had. That means Eli Manning. We keep hearing that Odell Beckham, Jr. is the most important guy the Giants have. That will happen with any wide receiver when one of them figures out a way to throw the ball to himself.

If you saw Monday night’s game you know about that big fourth-down, delay-of-game penalty when the Giants were near the Lions’ goal line. I frankly wasn’t sure why McAdoo was going for it there in a 17-7 game and plenty of time left; why he didn’t kick the ball in the first place with more than a quarter still left to play. But that’s what the coach, who is still calling the plays, wanted to do. Go for it. Then Eli didn’t get the play off, and the Giants ended up kicking a field goal, anyway.

“Sloppy quarterback play,” McAdoo said. “Quarterback and center need to be on the same page there. We need to get the ball snapped.”

Then McAdoo, who really hasn’t covered himself in glory as the Giants have started the season with two losses, said this about Eli Manning:

“….we have a veteran quarterback who has played a lot of football and I expect us to get the ball snapped,” McAdoo explained. “Usually the clock goes from 3-2-1-0. Once it hits zero (the officials) look at the ball and look at the clock; usually it has to tick once it hits zero to get the ball snapped without it being a delay of game. I thought we had a chance to get it off.”

Obviously, Eli Manning hasn’t covered himself in glory, against either the Cowboys or the Lions. Quarterbacks, elite and otherwise, rarely do when they spend as much time watching unblocked defensive guys keep coming for them. You want to know one of the big reasons why Aaron Rodgers lost to the Falcons the night before? Because the television cameras kept showing images of his two best blockers standing on the sideline.

Eli can take it, by the way. We all know that by now. He can take it from the other team and get back up, so he can take a little criticism from the current head coach, even if he never heard much like that from the previous coach, the one with whom he won two Super Bowls. Now that former coach, Tom Coughlin, is running the Jaguars, where he started out as an NFL head coach. And McAdoo is the offensive guru who replaced him, and got the Giants into the playoffs last year, where they were promptly beaten at Lambeau Field, where Coughlin and Eli — famously — were 2-0 in playoff games.

The wisdom on this, not surprisingly, comes from the great George Young. There was a time when Jim Fassel was the head coach, when Fassel was supposed to be the offensive guru, when Mr. Young was heard to say the following: “It’s time for the guru to start guru-ing.” We know Eli will get better, because he is better than he has shown. But how about his head coach goes first? It is now eight straight games for the Giants when they haven’t scored more than 20 points, since they rang up the vaunted Browns for 27 last November. If you think this is all Eli’s fault, then you also believe that pigs can fly. Even the Jets scored some points against the Raiders last Sunday. This isn’t all on McAdoo. Still: All Giants fans who like the guy’s playcalling, just so far this season, need to send up flares. No. 10 is simply too cool and too classy to ever say anything about his coach. He says he loves McAdoo. You would expect nothing less of him. You just expect more of the guy coaching the team. It was interesting that a couple of days after the Giants loss to Detroit the team’s offensive coordinator, Mike Sullivan, stuck up for Ben McAdoo a lot more than McAdoo stuck up for Eli after the Lions game. All of this changes if the Giants get a game off the Eagles. But nothing changes unless the guys up front pick this particular Sunday start blocking for Eli again. And nothing changes with the Giants unless and until McAdoo figures out a way to consistently incorporate a running game into that fast offense we’re constantly hearing about.

We will begin to find out, in a divisional game like this, just how good the Giants can be this season. I keep asking the question: If Jerry Reese didn’t build this team to win this season, then when? Reese will also get a lot of room around here, a lot, because of the two Super Bowls the Giants won after Ernie Accorsi left, even though the core of the first team to beat the Patriots didn’t assemble itself before Reese was on the job. And because Reese sure has drafted Beckham and Landon Collins since.

But the end of the story, in both those Super Bowl games, was that Eli Manning - twice - made all the plays you’re supposed to make to win the big game, including the two most important and most famous throws in the history of the team, all the way back to 1925, one to David Tyree in Glendale, Ariz. and one to Mario Manningham, from the shadow of his own goalposts, in Indy.

Now Reese comes into the season with the same offensive linemen he had last season, only a couple of whom have been ever confused with blocks of granite. Apparently he convinced himself that at least a couple of guys to whom Eli is handing the ball off were going to turn into Jim Brown this season. Maybe it does all change today, while they continue to ask Eli to find enough time behind Ereck Flowers. “They” in this case means McAdoo and Reese.

“It’s hard to admit you’re wrong about a guy (Flowers) you took that high (No. 9) in the first round,” an active member of the Giants family told me the other day.

The head coach said to put it on him last Monday night. We can do that if his team doesn’t get to 1-2 today. We know how the Giants stepped on it after a slow start last season. It’s still time for the guru to start guruing in Philly.