Game Time!

Thoughts before the game...

• Eli Manning will make mistakes. While Manning has received a great deal of credit for the Giants' 6-0 run, he's been something short of excellent, throwing 8 TDs vs. 1 interception, and his completion rate on the season is only 58.2% ( a good bit better than his career completion % of 54.8). In fact, his game vs. Dallas in week one was by far his best effort of the season. The Giants average less than 200 yards passing per game.


• So if the Giants aren't winning with the pass, they're winning with the run, right? Well, yes and no. The Giants rush for about 8 yards per game more than the Cowboys, or about 1 extra carry each from Barber and Jones. But half of those stats were made without the Giants primary back, Brandon Jacobs. In the four games returning from his injury sustained against the Cowboys, Jacobs has rushed for 424 yards on 74 carries, an impressive 5.8 yards per carry. The Giants are averaging 25 points per game since Jacobs returned, including three 30+ point performances. This includes the highly unusual London game in which no one was able to move the ball due to poor field conditions.


• There are some interesting similarities in the receiving core of each team. Both are led by a somewhat mouthy wide receiver (Owens and the Giants Plaxico Burress), and the 2nd option is a strong pass-catching tight end (Witten, and Jeremy Shockey). Witten and Shockey produce very similar stats, but after the uproar Shockey brought his first few years in the league, I'll take Witten, no matter how much Shockey 'matures'.


• The Giants and the Cowboys have split the season series every year since 2001. So the Giants have that going for them today. Which is nice.


• This is Tank Johnson's (see picture above) first game as a Cowboy, which conveniently enough doubles as his first game back from the league's 8-game suspension due to weapons charges. The Tank will be in the defensive tackle rotation right away, but don't expect him to dominate today. It will take him a few games to catch up with the rest of the NFL which has been going strong for 9 weeks now. Still no other team will get to add a young, rested, talented defensive tackle to their roster at mid-season. He should provide a spark for the Cowboys defense just by being in there.


• The Giants have 30 sacks on the season, leading the league with an impressive 3.75 a game. The Cowboys have only 21 (2.6 per game). But if you remove the Giants game vs. the Eagles, where the Giants sacked Donovan McNabb a league record 12 times, the Giant's per game average falls to...2.6 per game. That kind of rate is still good enough to place both teams around the top 10 in the league at getting after the quarterback, but it's not the decided advantage to the Giants that it appears on paper.

It's almost game time. I've felt the Cowboy's were going to win all week, and nothing has changed. This is the best team in the NFC, and this is a great game to show the rest of the league.