HOLE BUNCH SENT PACKIN’
Clueless OBJ & party pals punch out as Green Bay sinks Giants’ ship
GREEN BAY — Odell Beckham Jr., with a straight face, said after Sunday’s 38-13 season-ending whitewashing at the hands of the Packers that the Giants had been “inches away” from making the big plays but that, no, last Monday’s Miami Club & Sail getaway had “nothing” to do with it.
So wait, let’s review that logic: Lose by 25 points. Drop two passes including a touchdown. And then refuse to regret spending one of the six days prior cooling off with Justin Bieber and Trey Songz in an environment with drugs.
Sorry, not exactly the recipe for beating the hottest team in football. That cliche “less is more?” Yeah. Doesn’t apply in the NFL.
“It sounds typical to me,” Beckham said of people who would blame this on the Miami trip. “But at the end of the day I went through practice, had zero drops, zero missed assignments. There was nothing that could connect seven days ago to today and how we came out and played and executed. There’s just nothing in the world. That’s not realistic.”
Beckham is missing the point, not to mention he hasn’t learned his lesson about how to control his emotions, either.
After the third-year receiver reflected on his four catches on 11 targets for 28 yards in his first career playoff game, Beckham reportedly punched a hole in the wall outside the losing locker room and banged his head against that same wall inside the halls of hallowed Lambeau Field, per ESPN. “I don’t know anything about it,” GM Jerry Reese said, about 20 yards away behind a closed door from the hole Beckham supposedly opened. “I’ve been sitting here.”
This is, of course, nothing new. Beckham lost his cool similarly after the Giants’ Week 16 loss in Philadelphia, banging his head into a storm door and grunting and screaming before being escorted into the visitors’ locker room by none other than co-owner John Mara and other members of the Giants staff. “I think it did a great job at creating distractions for us, and it’s unfortunate,” Beckham added. “That’s just the way this world is. There’s just no way you can connect something that happened seven days ago to this game today, and how we came out and played and how the Packers have won seven in a row and how they scored 38 points and how they executed. They came up with the third downs, they did what they needed to do. So the connection is just not there in my opinion. But everyone can have their own opinion, so.”
Again, don’t see the logic: If an opponent is daunting, isn’t that rationale for going the extra mile in preparation, not doing the bare minimum? Beckham, though, even had his buddies covering for his Sunday shortcomings on Twitter. Songz, the musician pictured with Beckham, Sterling Shepard, Victor Cruz and Roger Lewis in the infamous yacht photo from Miami, argued that if the party was the reason for the Giants’ struggles, what was the secondary’s excuse?
“DB’s weren’t on the yacht. Just a lil FYI,” Songz said. That’s cute. You know what isn’t? Coming up small in the biggest game of your career and pretending like you couldn’t have done more when you could have.
Cruz, 30, the senior member of the group who “next question”ed reporters to death after the game, might come off looking smallest here. But Beckham’s comment after the loss that the Giants “didn’t come out and catch stride again” after Aaron Rodgers’ Hail Mary to end the first half was absolutely maddening.
So Beckham is saying that after Eli Manning hit Tavarres King for a 41-yard touchdown pass to cut the Packers’ lead to 14-13 with 5:16 remaining in the third quarter, Beckham — what — knew it was slipping away? Give me a break. Here are the facts: Beckham’s third-down drop that ended the Giants’ first drive, and his dropped touchdown that forced the Giants to settle for a field goal on the offense’s second try, killed the Giants’ chances of putting the game in their defense’s hands with a commanding lead. That was their recipe for beating Green Bay.
Beckham and Shepard each dropped two passes early, including one touchdown opportunity apiece, and their mistakes were devastating. Beckham at least admitted “we didn’t really come out and make those plays,” but his extended explanation of the football’s location, his anticipation, how quickly the ball came up on him on those two drops, or how it surprised him, was tough to listen to. This is the great Beckham, the one-handed catching master, one of the best receivers in the NFL. He is expected to make these plays. Davante Adams made a way tougher catch on Rodgers’ first touchdown pass than either Beckham or Shepard had to make on the touchdowns they dropped. In Pittsburgh earlier Sunday, the real best receiver in the league, Antonio Brown, had five catches, 124 yards and two TDs. The Blue-colored glasses storyline went that Green Bay’s secondary was banged up and the Giants were about to shred it, right?
Beckham is so self-aware that he had the entire media pegged — well, the small percentage of the media covering this story, anyway — for how it would react. “Yeah, absolutely. It started before the game, though,” he said of the Miami talk. “It happened early and then it did a great job in putting in people’s mind that, ‘OK, now if the Giants lose it’s because you went to Miami.’ It doesn’t really connect to me. That’sforyouguys to figure out. I went
through the entire week of practice fully locked in. You could ask anybody. I definitely didn’t expect the game to go this way today. We just came out and when we had opportunities we didn’t put them away, and we gave them life... But gotta credit the Packers. They’re a great team.” Beckham’s teammates weren’t commenting much on the Miami trip. One Giant said it was not a topic of conversation among players during the week. “It was only brought up in the media,” the player said. “In meetings, in the locker room, nobody spoke of it. So I think if anything was a distraction, it would be the guys that listened to the social media, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, how the media tries to talk about it. But other than that, it wasn’t brought up this week.”
Asked about any connection between the Miami trip and Sunday’s drops, the Giant said: “No, I mean, they’re grown men and they chose what they wanted to do on their off day. That’s their decision.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement Shepard also said the Miami trip had “nothing to do with it at all,” but he was one of the many receivers who went on the field shirtless pregame with Beckham. “We weren’t afraid of the cold,” Shepard said of the receivers’ message. “That wasn’t gonna play a factor with us, and we just went out there to get used to it.”
They should have just left their shirts off. It would have made the Packers’ undressing of the Giants go that much quicker.
“These are the learning experiences, as tough as they are, this is what you stand on and grow from,” Beckham said. “It sucks. There’s no way to put it. It sucks. It’s a horrible feeling.”
Does Beckham hear what he is saying? Does he really not a see a connection between treating this as a learning experience and beginning his corrections with, say, not pulling an all-nighter like he’s won a championship already? Seemingly not. He’ll have a long offseason to think about it, though, on the beach.