Week 11: NY Giants at Detroit

The Giants’ recent six-game winning streak proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the G-Men are indeed better than such teams as the Falcons and Jets. There may have been people who didn’t already think that – people who only watch Arena Football; people in comas; off-their-meds Falcons fans – but the evidence is now irrefutable. And, as the Giants’ nasty Week 10 loss to the Cowboys proves, that evidence is also irrelevant. Going into Week 11, Giants fans are nervous, even though the rest of their schedule is none too daunting.

Lions fans would trade places with them in a minute, though, and not just because it would give the aforementioned fans an opportunity to move out of the greater Detroit metro area and perhaps enjoy a New Jersey-style hero sandwich. (Oh, you don’t know? It’s like the ones they made wherever you grew up, but better and with more shredded iceberg lettuce) Detroit also got its butt kicked last week, only instead of losing to the pretty-good Cowboys, it was to the, uh, Arizona Cardinals.

As bad as a whupping by the Cardinals inevitably looks, though, a glance at the box score is even worse: Detroit tallied minus-14 yards on eight rushes…actually read that again. Okay? Also, Detroit threw the ball a stunning 45 times, turned the ball over five times and allowed four touchdown passes to an inconsistent offense that was stuck wearing monstrous all-red uniforms that left them looking like one of the opposing teams in Any Given Sunday. And if Giants fans are nervous, Lions fans should be downright scared: the rest of their schedule is murder.

So is this the beginning of the end for the Lions, who have yet to lose at home, but have also yet to beat a decent team? Eh…we don’t know. To a certain degree, we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on these guys all season long. They can’t run the ball at all; Kevin Jones is still nursing an injured foot, and they chose to simply abandon the run rather than give Aveion Cason, Tatum Bell or T.J. Duckett a chance in Week 10. They’re quarterbacked by Jon Kitna, who has taken so many hits that his tiny, glassy eyes look as if they belong on a stuffed animal. And their defense has been getting by on takeaways – their 28 are tops in the NFL – without actually being any good. Detroit is 24th in points-allowed and 26th in yards-allowed, and their spotty secondary, marginal pass rush and green linebacking corps all imply that those numbers mean more than those three-plus takeaways per game. So the Giants offense should crush these guys, right?

Well, yeah, except that we don’t trust the Giants offense, either. When they stick to running the ball – the facet in which the beefy Lions defensive line fares best, incidentally, yielding just 98.0 yards per game – the Giants usually do fine, but QB Eli Manning still has a knack for combining bad decisions with bad throws, and WR Plaxico Burress has finally started playing like an injured person the last two weeks. The Giants should be able to score on Detroit, and have the potential to control the game clock with their running game, but…

Well, it’s possible that the Giants secondary is worse than Detroit’s. And that matters. The Giants’ NFL-best pass rush covers up a multitude of weaknesses in coverage, and may once again do so against a gimpy Lions O-line that has given up more sacks than any other team in the NFL. But if Kitna gets time to sling the ball downfield – we’ll assume he’ll be throwing a lot, and that Jones (who has to play again on Thanksgiving against Green Bay) will be used sparingly against a tough Giants run defense – the Lions have the personnel to do serious damage. Roy Williams’ two-touchdown breakout in Week 10 could easily be repeated against Giants corners Sam Madison or Aaron Ross. If Kitna’s upright, he and his receivers could put up a lot of points. We think he’ll spend a lot of the day sniffing smelling salts, though. Don’t worry, he’s used to it by this point.

The baseline fact of this game is this: neither of these teams seems quite as good as their records suggest. And it’s likely that, by the end of the season, at least one of them will have been exposed as a mediocre team; we’re thinking that it’s probably Detroit, by dint of their talent deficit on defense and bizarrely unbalanced offense, and that the exposure will start here.

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