THE Jets ventured into the Superdome 3-0 and look at them now, 3-3 and in the midst of an alarming freefall.
The Giants ventured into the Superdome 5-0 and look at them yesterday, 5-1 and absolutely, positively certain there will be no Drew Brees hangover, no damage to their psyche whatsoever.
“It doesn’t change our expectations,” Eli Manning was saying yesterday.
And here’s why I have no doubt they are right:
While rookies Rex Ryan and Mark Sanchez have won three games together, Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning have won a Super Bowl together. While I believe that Ryan and Sanchez, once he wipes the tears from his 22-year-old eyes, will have a legitimate chance to have successful NFL careers, Coughlin is 21-6 since the Giants’ 2007 playoff run and Manning is 31-10 over his last 41 games.
There is a culture of winning around the Giants that cushions them from the emotional roller-coaster ridden by less mature and less swaggerlicious teams.
“It’s one game,” Manning said. “You can learn a lot from one game, but you can’t freak out, you can’t start getting nervous, or start having doubts and worrying about one game . . . that’s football. We’ve played five excellent games, and we had a bad performance the other day.”
As Coughlin said yesterday, a little humility is not a bad thing.
“Everybody’s upset, everybody’s a little mad . . . but we’re not discouraged, and that’s important,” Manning said. “That’s important for some of our young guys especially.”
How can you tell that?
“Just the ways guys are acting around here,” Manning said. “It’s not like guys are completely in here hanging their head and complaining. Guys came in, they were ready to work, they had a good attitude about the corrections and what’s going on . . . we’ve been through losses before. We had a bad loss last year at Cleveland — I thought a worse one than this, just ’cause I thought we couldn’t do anything in that game. When you have opportunities and you don’t make ’em, that kinda makes you frustrated, that makes you mad, but it’s not discouraging.”
Winning is a habit around these parts of Giants Stadium, and their success enables the Giants to pay no mind to the naysayers who cry they have only beaten the dregs of the league thus far.
“We’re not all of a sudden think[ing] that we’re not a good team,” Manning said.
“I think we’ve learned through the past that it doesn’t matter who you beat, or who you lose to during the regular season,” Shaun O’Hara said. “The key is getting to the playoffs, and winning those games. I think we learned that firsthand in ’07, and maybe we learned it firsthand last year . . . we had beat Philly earlier on, and they come back and beat us in the playoffs, so what matters?”
Then there is Coughlin’s Leadership Council, which is invaluable, especially during difficult times.
“I think the mentality and the psyche of this team, it starts at the top,” O’Hara said. “And I really think that the veteran guys on this team have very good leadership qualities, and I think that’s what you have to have — you have to have good lieutenants and good colonels as well as a good general. This team does a good job of that — of kinda taking care of each other, take care of our own.”
They didn’t show up against Brees. Didn’t unleash their vaunted pass rush. Didn’t cover in the patchwork secondary. A good team played a bad game.
“I think everybody in this locker room felt like we let each other down by not playing our best football,” O’Hara said. “But it’s not anything that is world-ending.”
Now Bring on Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald.
“This is supposed to hurt, you’re not supposed to be excited about losing — we despise it — so at the end of the day we’re gonna get this bad taste out of our mouths and go forward to getting that winning feeling back,” Danny Clark said.
Manning was asked about Sanchez (5 INTs against the Bills).
“I’m trying to worry about the Giants right now,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll let someone else worry about the Jets.”
Like their fans.