COWBOY UP!
Giants out to o sweep Dallas
N THE days leading up to the biggest game the Giants have played at home since the 2011 playoffs, against the 11-1 Cowboys on Sunday night at MetLife Stadium, coach Ben McAdoo showed his team a video of a peaceful lion before its cage was rattled and it reminded everyone why it is the king of beasts.
“We have to stay hungry. We have to be hungry, and it’s time to ... it’s time to eat,” McAdoo told The Post.
“We had one with a man and a kangaroo. It’s a video on the internet that’s gone viral. The kangaroo had his dog in a headlock, and he bopped the kangaroo in the nose. It was a fist fight between the kangaroo and the man.”
“I think this guy was a hunter or something,” Brad Wing told The Post, “and the kangaroo had the guy’s dog in a headlock. I guess the kangaroo and the dogg were fighting,g and he was trying to protect his dog, so he went over and kind of separated the two and then punched him in the face.”
What was the point of it?
“Just to not be scared, I think that’s what he was going for with that one,” Wing said. “Just to rise to the opportunity and just kind of react, just play without thinking too much.”
“Everybody has a plan about what they’re gonna do and how they’re gonna do it until they get punched in the face,” Victor Cruz
said. “And I think that’s what Coach is trying to instill in us, that we need to come out firing, and see how they respond.” And the lion? “He lays there, he lets his kids play with him, he lets the wife bite at him, eventually the animals in the jungle see that and they think that he’s ... soft,” Jay Bromley said. “They think that they can kind of do whatever they want to him. Until the animals started coming closer, and then the lion has to kind of eat somebody, because he has to let them that [know] it ain’t all fun and games.”
You do not have to be atop the NFC East to consider yourself the king of beasts.
“I think the lion was to indicate how the lion seems to just chill and be passive in his own state until he’s provoked and until it’s time to do what a lion does,” Cruz said. “And we have to be that way and feel that way this upcoming game.” Rumble in the Giants’ wintry jungle. And there is no better stage than this one for a franchise that has been mired in misery the past four years, to stand up and make an earth-quaking statement that will be heard around the NFL that the New York Football Giants are back, with as much of a right to a Super Bowl dream as anyone. As much of a right as Jerry Jones’ team. “I think it’d be a statement that we’re a really good team, and that it’ll be one of those wins that gives us the confidence we need to go through the rest of our schedule and into the postseason and take care of business,” Cruz said.
A sweep of these rampaging Cowboys, these precocious Dak Prescott-Ezekiel Elliott Cowboys, almost certainly won’t lead to the NFC title. It would, however, move the Giants tantalizingly closer to clinching a playoff berth and keep them from the likelihood of having to win two of their last three games to get in.
It would inject them with the self-belief they indeed are who they think they are. Even without Jason Pierre-Paul.
And, of course, it would send this unmistakeable message to the Cowboys: You do not want to see us in the playoffs.
Which means it is time for Eli Manning to remind the Cowboys, not to mention the rest of the league: You do not want to see me in the playoffs.
Manning’s mandate: Be better than Prescott.
Get Odell Beckham Jr. the ball early and often instead of later and often, and spread the ball around so no one is wondering Giantswhy Sterling notes Shepard/ Page or CruzXX was not targeted, not even once.
Convert on third down and sustain drives enough to keep Elliott and his vaunted offensive line off the field. The Giants are 31st in time of possession (26:44). The Cowboys are second (32:03).
There are six Giants left from that Super Bowl XLVI team that whipped the Cowboys, 31-14, in a winner-take-all division championship showdown at MetLife Stadium in the regular-season finale.
Manning was 24-33 for 346 yards and three touchdowns including a 74-yarder to Cruz (six catches for 178 yards and a touchdown) in the first quarter. He outdueled someone named Tony Romo that day.
“When the biggest games come up,” Pugh said, “Eli Manning has played his best football.”