OPENING GIVEAWAY
Any way you want to put it, Giants gifted Cowboys a victory
ARLINGTON, Texas — Honestly, it’s not just that the Giants lost this one. It’s not just the galling reality that they allowed their ancient rivals from Texas to steal a 2726 victory, every bit as much as if the Cowboys had reached into their pockets and pilfered all their billfolds. That part? That’s bad enough.
But in this case, the “how” trumps the “what.”
In this case, it was the manner in which this meltdown occurred that was every bit as troubling, every bit as inexcusable, as the meltdown itself.
“My fault,” coach Tom Coughlin said. “The end of the game … that’s on nobody else but me.”
Coughlin was being true to his core beliefs there, demanding accountability for himself the way he asks everyone who works for him to do it. And yes: ultimately, this loss lands like an anvil on the shoulders of a head coach who can no longer afford to shoulder many more of them.
But he wasn’t alone. Start with Steve Spagnuolo, the old hero defensive coordinator, who ordered his defense into a tortoise shell after that same ultraopportunistic unit had helped the Giants seize a 2313 lead. That depleted “D” had hounded the Cowboys into three costly turnovers that yielded 17 points, but with 7:57 left in the game he backed them off, and the Cowboys pounced.
“Like a hot knife through butter,” Coughlin lamented.
And still, they should have survived. Despite it all, the Giants were grinding out the clock. They benefited from some rampant stupidity by Dallas defenders, including an unsportsmanlike penalty against Jeremy Mincey (which, for the record, stopped the clock and allowed the Cowboys to bank a timeout rather than burn one, a dumb rule that was essentially an unindicted coconspirator to the calamity in progress).
Then: thirdandgoal, from the 1.
The Cowboys had just taken their final timeout. There were 103 seconds left in the game. Someone — surely Ben McAdoo, the offensive coordinator, though Coughlin could have vetoed it and didn’t — decided against running the ball which, at the least, even if they couldn’t cover the final 36 inches to pay dirt, would have dissolved 40 seconds.
Seven months ago, the world balled its fists and screamed out loud at the Seattle tandem of Pete Carroll and Darrell Bevell, who eschewed a run at the goal line of Super Bowl XLIX, famously put the ball in the air, and famously blew a chance for backtoback championships.
Now Coughlin and McAdoo teamed up to do the same thing.
“The decision to throw the ball was not a good decision,” Coughlin said. “It should have
been a run whether we scored or not. We had a chance to take a few more seconds off the clock, run it, take it and kick the field goal, and another 40 seconds or so would come off the clock .... Coughlin shook his head. “The strategy,” he said, “was obviously wrong at the end.”
A word about Eli Manning, who didn’t have his strongest game by any stretch (20for36, 193 yards) but stood at the doorstep of the kind of impactful, earlyseason win that has escaped him for three years. Manning could have bailed his coaches out, could have canceled the play when he saw nothing open, taken a sack, kept the clock spinning. He didn’t do that, either.
“A hundred percent on me right there,” Manning said. “Bad thought management on my part. That can’t happen.”
So the Giants settled for a field goal, and hoped 2620 would be enough, but was there even a soul back home in New York that thought it would be enough? Surely the 93,579 inside AT&T Stadium felt differently. And this is where the baton in this coaching relay from hell wound up in the hands of the man who started it all.
Actually, by this point, there was little Spagnuolo could do. Romo looked at the Giants’ defense and must have felt like he was working 11on6: 24 yards to Lance Dunbar. Sixteen yards, again to Dunbar. Thirteen yards to Jason Witten. Eight to Terrance Williams — the only one of the first five plays on which the Cowboys even considered going out of bounds. Because they didn’t need to. Because instead of 57 seconds to work with, Romo started with 97 seconds. And so it was, 13 seconds left in the game, Romo got the ball, dropped it, picked it up (and since no Giant laid a finger on him all night, he knew he was in no imminent danger).
And drove a stake right through the Giants’ soul.
The stake handed to him by the Giants themselves.
“We’ll rise up from this,” Coughlin said, and it was a nice thing to say about his team, but here’s the greater truth on a night when 10 turned into 01 in the most galling way possible: Seeing is believing.