BIG BLUE’S THE WEAKEST LINC
EAGLES 34 GIANTS 29 Raucous Philly fans drown out Giants & make MetLife home
The cheesesteaks, soft pretzels with mustard and the famed Rocky statue were in Philadelphia, but otherwise MetLife Stadium was made to feel like home sweet home for the Eagles. It was not even a hostile takeover as so many Giants fans were happy to recoup part of their season ticket money in a lost season. They bailed on their team that has won only two games and sold their tickets to Philadelphia fans willing to schlep up the Jersey Turnpike.
It’s hard to blame them. They’ve suffered enough.
If the Eagles were wearing their green jerseys and Odell Beckham Jr., was around to impersonate a dog peeing in the end zone, it would have been The Linc.
It was that loud. There was that much green in the stands.
The E-A-G-L-E-S, Eagles, Eagles, Eagles, chant rocked the house.
The Giants were supposed to be Super Bowl contenders and with three December home division games, MetLife was going to be a hot ticket. Instead, the ticket was colder than the weather and colder than the Giants have been all season.
Even though the Giants are now 2-12 and the Eagles are 12-2, Giants fans gave away keys to their kingdom.
“It’s not discouraging at all,” Giants defensive end Olivier Vernon said.
But then he added, “You wouldn’t expect that from your home crowd. At the end of the day, there is nothing you can do about that. The only thing you can do is go out there and get a W. If anything, that motivates us even more.” It was worth the trip for Eagles fans. In their first game without Carson Wentz, the Eagles beat the Giants 3429 and clinched a first round bye and moved closer to the No. 1 seed. If Steve Spagnuolo is trying to impress his bosses to take the interim tag off his Giants title, giving up four touchdown passes to backup quarterback Nick Foles won’t look too good on his resume
Spags said his priority is not trying to make a case to keep his job. “I’ll tell you what I am doing right here,” he said. “I’m trying to get a football team ready to play a game and I thought they did that.” What did we learn Sunday?
Every now and then, the Giants play inspired, even in a season on the way to 2-14, which would set a franchise record for losses. We also learned Eli Manning can still sling it — he threw for 434 yards and three touchdowns — and put some good stuff on tape so the Giants new general manager and coach can feel the same way as John Mara and want Manning back on the team in 2018. What else? Thanks to the Eagles fans, we found out MetLife Stadium can actually be as loud as Giants Stadium used to be. This is the eighth year for the new stadium and it hasn’t jumped like the old place.
It’s hard to say more than 50% of the stadium were Eagles fans, but they seemed to account for 75% of the noise, even more down the stretch when they were chanting, “Defense, defense, defense,” on the Giants’ last drive.
“There was a lot of Eagles fans out there,” Vernon said. “It is what it is. We ain’t winning, so what do you expect to happen? The Giants fans that were in the stadium supporting us, we appreciate them.”
The Eagles fans invaded and the only retribution was cops handcuffed a fan wearing an Eagles No. 11 jersey and escorted him through the bowels of the stadium after the game.
But start to finish, the Giants have never felt more like the road team at home than they did Sunday.
“Obviously they are having a great year, so why wouldn’t they be cheering,” Jason Pierre-Paul said. “That was the Eagles fans. It is what it is.”
This was worse than late in the 1978 season when fans burned tickets, rented an airplane to fly over the stadium pleading for the end of bad football and hung Wellington Mara in effigy from the mezzanine.
“I mean, you know it’s a rival game, their fans are going to travel,” Vernon said. “Regardless of the situation, we came out trying to get a W. It didn’t go our way, even though we were fighting. That’s been the tale of the tape this whole season.”
The Giants had a chance to win after taking over at their 20 with 3:51 remaining. Manning drove them to a first and goal at the 9. On first down, a short pass to Sterling Shepard lost two yards and second down was an incompletion to Roger Lewis. Just 54 seconds were left and the Giants had all three of their timeouts left. The clock was not an issue.
On third down, Shane Vereen picked up five yards, setting up a more manageable fourth down. If not for the putrid special teams, the Giants could have gone for a field goal here to send the game into OT.
But the special teams pulled off an amazing trifecta having an extra point, punt and field goal attempt blocked. The missed extra point on their first touchdown in the first quarter forced the Giants to go for two when they were down 31-29. Manning was sacked. Philly added a field goal with 3:56 left to make it 34-29. If the Giants had successfully kicked the two extra points, they could have settled for a field goal to get even at 34.
Now it was fourth down and many of the Eagles fans were sitting in the end zone where the Giants were driving. The defense chant was so loud that right tackle Bobby Hart was backing up so ahead of the snap that he was nearly three yards behind the line of scrimmage with the rest of the line holding their place.
That false start made it fourth down from the 11 instead of the 6 and Manning’s pass sailed over the head of tight end Evan Engram deep in the end zone.
“It’s a tough situation, I don’t blame Bobby [Hart],” Manning said. “At home, it’s loud. (Center) Brett Jones couldn’t hear me call the cadence. You don’t think having that [at home], but I guess when you’ve only won two games, there’s a lot of Eagles fans and they were loud and we couldn’t hear the cadence, that’s why we jumped offsides.”
It’s hard to get calls in crunch time on the road.