Told You So!
The Giants figure to be mediocre at best. Don Banks, pro football reporter, Sports Illustrated Aug. 30, 2007
We now know that a flawed Eli will never be Peyton, but he doesnt have to be. The Giants will settle for consistency BOTTOM LINE: Too many people have to step up to get this team to the postseason. Tom Coughlins hot seat is burning. Hank Gola, Daily News, Sept. 5, 2007
unless Manning takes a major step forward, the Giants will struggle to make the playoffs. Clifton Brown, The New York Times, The Fifth Down blog, Sept. 1, 2007
You know the Giants are a mess. Their best player on offense retired, and their best player on defense threatened to join him. They have no left tackle and are stuck with out-of-position guard David Diehl trying to protect Eli Mannings blind side. The secondary has huge holes. The head coach is a lame duck on a one-year contract who doesnt seem to garner much respect in the locker room. Aaron Schatz, The New York Sun, Aug. 31, 2007
In the four months since they proffered their predictions, the above sportswriters (and all of their equally short-sighted colleagues) have watched from the press box as the New York Giants proved themand everyonewrong, by defying conventional wisdom and the inexact science of sports prediction. When they arrive on the field at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. for this Sundays Super Bowl, theyll have the added pleasure of knowing that they defied all those who said it couldnt be done.
And that list includes every sportswriter covering professional football in New York Cityat The Times, The Daily News, The Post and The Sunas well as reporters at Sports Illustrated, USA Today, The Sporting News and ESPN.
Every sportswriter, that is, except ESPNs Gene Wojciechowski, who boldly predicted in ESPN.com last August that that if one NFC team is going to shock the world, its going to be ... the New York Giants.
Which they did. And no one was more shocked than the sportswriters themselves.
Its a time-honored tradition for newspapers to predict the final standings in Americas top-three professional sports (football, basketball and baseball)and an almost equally time-honored tradition for those forecasts to be false. Sports fans love nothing more than to relive the past and speculate about the future, which explains the popularity of radio stations like WFAN, the endless debates that dominate Internet forums, sports-bar banter and water-cooler conversation.
But sportswriter predictions dont exist just to fan the flames of idle chatter. Sports betting is a $150-billion industry, and Vegas oddsmakers say no sport attracts more wagering than professional football. This adds weight to the significance of this wildly inexact science, in which sportswriters use their knowledge of the teams to tell readers, in no uncertain terms, what seems likeliest to happen, when teams finish their regular season and proceed to the conference playoffs and, eventually, the Super Bowl.
Allen Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago called the error term of the sports medias preseason picks pretty large. But he pointed out that sports reporters risk very little by making a bad pick. I suppose if [the reporter] were a total idiot, at some point hed get fired, Sanderson said, but in the meantime, no[theres] very little cost to saying anything you want.
And so while no one knew in August that the Giants would win the NFC championship, they did know one thingthat by the time December rolled around, no one would remember, or hold them accountable, for just how wrong they were.
We decided to go back and see just how wrong the sportswriters really were. And we found they were almost as wide of the mark as Lawrence Tynes fourth-quarter field goal attempts against the Green Bay Packers.
The Giants are putting a lot of faith in a guyBrandon Jacobswho consistently struggled to pick up first downs in short-yardage situations last season [They] were 5-3 on the road, wrote Jim Rich in The Daily News on Sept. 7, in a typically dire assessment. There wont be many opportunities to make money with Big Blue this season .
Even the predictions that came closest to being accurate werent very impressive. What has made the NFL so exciting over the past decade is the chase, and the mystery of the underdog down the stretch. And who knows, maybe some lesser club will knock off one of the big boys in the postseason, Pro Football Weeklys Eric Edholm wrote of the Giants, in The New York Sun, on Oct. 8.
The schedule is fair, and an underdog mentality usually translates into a surprise season for Giants, The New York Posts Paul Schwartz conceded on Sept. 5, though he felt they wouldnt be able to squeeze into the playoffs.
To be fair, it should be noted that no one except delusional, diehard fans thought the team had a realistic chance of ending up in the Super Bowl this season.
With the departure of the Giants star running back, Tiki Barber, the threatened departure of their best defensive player, Michael Strahan, a head coach, Tom Coughlin, who seemed games away from getting fired, and a quarterback, Eli Manning, who had yet to live up to his supposed potential, the conventional wisdom was that the Giants would land in the middle of the NFC East, and consider themselves lucky if they got a playoff berth. There, it was widely believed, the Giants would be bettered by formidable opponents like the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eaglesboth teams it managed to beat.
Nobody liked the Giants because they were such a question mark, The New York Daily News Bill Gallo said in a telephone interview. The quarterback [Eli Manning], hes great guns now ... but they didnt expect him to even hang around for gods sake, the way he was playing, you know. He was so uneducated on the ways of playing quarterback. And then we find out ... who the kid is. We find out that he has that perseverance. We find out that he studies this game ... He had such gumption to correct his errors that ... now hes become one of the top quarterbacks...
And the coach [Tom Coughlin], same kinda thing, continued Gallo. The coach was gonna be run out of town for gods sake. And look where he is now. The special teams came around. But its always that impetus that does it. And the impetus was this kid, Eli.
Gallo remembers first seeing preseason picks about 25 years ago. Gallo, who has been at The New York Daily News for 60 years (and who, like many others, picked the Patriots to beat the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl this year), explained that preseason picks are guesses, no matter whos doing the guessing. And that goes for the sportswriters who hang out with teams at their camps before the season starts. To Gallo, the preseason pick is simply a pastime for fans, and publishers continue to run the picks because they sell papers.
A big reason for their popularity is that readers want to be right. And that influences the credibility the readers give to a columnist or to a publications picks. If its what they think, they say Hey, this guys great, whether he wins or loses ... Its a game of being right ... And sometimes you vie with the writer [and] say Hey, what the hell is he doing picking in a newspaper? Im better than him. I would say its 40 percent of the readers, feel that way, Gallo said. I get mail when Im wrong about something, that Im a bum, and I dont know anything and all that sorta stuff, you know.
Dave Cokin, a highly regarded gaming handicapper and award-winning ESPN radio host in Las Vegas, acknowledged in a phone interview last week that he had no idea the Giants would be in the Super Bowl at the beginning of the season. Theres no way I thought theyd be in the playoffs, to be honest with you, he said. I didnt think they were a very good football team.
Cokin credited Tom Coughlin, whose two consecutive playoff losses as the Giants head coach put his job in jeopardy at the beginning of the season, with the teams resurgence as a winning team. Basically until the Patriots game [on December 29th] ... they were kinda limping into the playoffs, a bottom seed in a weak conference, Cokin said. But something happened in that New England game where they ... just started believing in themselves ... There was great coaching by Coughlin. [He told them] Go out there and play these guys in a meaningless game, basically, but play it like it was the most important thing of all time. And they really bought into it ... And I think it galvanized the team.
Some sportswriters have at least learned from their early-season mistakes.
The Tom Coughlin era figures to be over this year. That was Salon.coms King Kaufman on writing about the Giants in his Sept., 6, NFL preview. The Tom Coughlin era figures to be over after this year. The team gave him a one-year extension for some reason, but his Youre late if youre not early routine has obviously grown thin Eli Manning may be a better quarterback than hes shown, but hes not going to show it behind the line thats in front of him. I think the Giants season is going to be a spiral, and it wouldnt surprise me if Coughlin doesnt survive it. The good news for Giants fans, as long as they dont think too much about their tax bill: Theyve broken ground on the new stadium .
The tone of Kaufmans Jan. 22 column had changed.
Yes, the New York Giants have a chance, Kaufman wrote. They have a chance to pull off the greatest Super Bowl upset since the Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 39 years ago.