We here at Sports From The Basement have spent the majority of the 2015 NFL season piling it on the NFC East. Here are exhibits A, B, & C. It isn’t like they don’t deserve it though. For years what has been mistaken for the “most competitive” division in the NFL is truly a battle to see who can be the least bird-brained. Monday night’s game between Washington and Dallas encompassed all the calamities that NFC East teams have shown all season long. It might has well have been a three hour bottle of sports fan repellent. Pair that with the fiasco of a conclusion to the Battle of New York, and not even a gigantic win by the Eagles over the Patriots could provide enough football air freshener to waft away the stink of the division.
We’ll start with the game most fresh in our minds. Let this fact sink in real quick though before we get started. The Dallas Cowboys entered last night’s contest at 3-8. With the win, they are just one game out of the division lead. A team with twice as many losses as wins is within one game of the division lead. Meanwhile, nine wins may not even be enough to secure a Wild Card spot in the AFC.
Yes, the Dallas Cowboys created a three way tie at the top of the NFC East trash heap. Washington, Philadelphia, and New York all sit at 5-7 while as stated before the Cowboys sit just one game back. Washington and Dallas squared off in a rousing game of “Anything you can do, I can do worse.” Fumbles, poor play calls, and even poorer execution had the game knotted at 9 when DeSean Jackson looked to have played the ultimate dumbbell trump card. But Jason Garrett got too antsy and his team scored immediately leaving Washington one last chance.
The Redskins would score in 30 seconds as poor kick coverage and a facemask penalty gave them prime field position. Jackson would redeem himself in a way with a touchdown, but once again they scored too quickly. The tables turned in less than a minute.
Kickoff coverage was once again abysmal as the Cowboys tried for a final scoring play from almost midfield. A dink, a dunk, and a 54 yard field goal later and a scintillating run of poor clock management, miserable defense, and dense coaching mercifully came to an end.
One week after a second collarbone break for Tony Romo, the Cowboys have been given a new lease on life in the NFC East. After not winning a single game during his last absence, they won their first game, a division one no less, in his second term in street clothes. It has also started up the yearly race to the finish in the NFC East in which the lead changes each week leading to a Week 17 in which networks have to unearth every conceivable tiebreaker scenario. And they’ll show it to you over…and over…and over.
But speaking of over and over, let’s get to the Giants. The G-Men have been their own worst enemy so many times this season. No team has gone through the full spectrum of human emotion more times in the fourth quarter than the New York Football Giants. In fact they have lost five games in the final minute of regulation. FIVE! That’s usually a haul of heartbreak for a decade never mind twelve games in one season. But once again these woes are all self-inflicted.
Eli Manning and Tom Coughlin have been a mythical pair for New York football. They have twice made remarkable runs to the NFL’s promised land. On both occasions they slayed the league’s supreme villain, the New England Patriots, giving their fans a shut up button for Patriots nation that no other organization possesses. But since their last joyous run to the NFL’s “Big Game”, the cracks in the Giants foundation have transformed into fault lines.
Eli Manning is easily the most inconsistent quarterback in the NFL. He is equal parts maddening and awe inspiring. He will drop a thirty yard sideline throw on the tip of a pin and then one play later trip over his own feet and throw an interception into quintuple coverage. Too many of the latter have come at the most inopportune times for the Giants this season, even more so in divisional games.
Coughlin isn’t without blame either. The red-faced keeper of his own time with meetings has had a horrid time with time management during games. Time mismanagement falls under a full fledged unawareness of what is going on over the course of the game. All these negatives were rolled up into one little ball for the Giants against the Jets in the (no surprise) fourth quarter. The Giants embarked on a titanic 17 play drive that spanned over nearly a full quarter’s worth of time. It ended metaphorically similar to the fate of the ship Titanic. Instead of taking three points to force the Jets to score two touchdowns to beat them, he went for it on fourth down from the four. That is when Eli went full Eli and threw a horrible interception in the end zone.
The Giants began their complete meltdown from there. Jets hit a field goal. Giants went three and out. Then the Jets drove to a touchdown, including having Ryan Fitzpatrick scramble for 15 yards on a fourth down to keep the drive alive. The Giants then ran out the clock. Overtime saw the Jets hit a field goal and the Giants miss theirs. The G-Men’s sideline had the look of accepted inevitability as Josh Brown’s first miss of the season hooked wide left.
The NFC East is going to put one team into the playoffs. They could even win a game from their spot like the 7-8-1 Panthers did last year. But the road to who represents the division in the postseason is going to be a bumpy one. You saw the NFC East in a nutshell Monday night. You saw a microcosm of the Giants season in one poorly called and executed play. It’s not going to get any better folks. But the tightness of the division race is going to make sure this dumpster fire stays front and center on the NFL schedule.