New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning visited with Michael Kay Tuesday on ESPN Radio 1050 in New York in advance of this Sunday's huge NFC East game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Sports Radio Interviews has the transcript, and we have some excerpts after the jump.
On the Giants’ bizarre traveling and scheduling odyssey this past weekend:
“It was a little different, and I think the biggest difference was our last practice before the game was Friday; we probably got off the field at about 12:30 or so, and we hadn’t do anything football related really since then. Usually on Saturday or the day before the game, we usually have a walk-through, or we have meetings in the morning, and you have a probably a 25 play walk-through or something like that. We didn’t even have that. We tried to leave early on Saturday to get to Minnesota, we got diverted to Kansas City, sat in the airport there for a couple of hours [in a section] that was kind of roped off where people couldn’t get in there. But just kind of sat there, either on the airplane or you could go into this portion. We sat there for two plus hours. i think a thing like that where for three days, you’re just off, a lot of waiting around, where are we going to play, what are the circumstances. You can kind of get off your rhythm. you lose a little bit of what you’ve practice on. In the NFL, you’re so trained to okay here’s our gameplan, this is what we’re doing this week, this is how we’re going to change things up, and you do it, you practice it, you play the game, and then all of a sudden you’ve got something new to learn. And you go three days without doing anything, and your mind may forget. So you’ve got to do a lot of review, talk things over, have a little chair drill Monday morning just to kind of get things fresh in our head. But offensively it took a little bit to find our rhythm, but we ran the ball extremely well, and played just well enough to win the game.”
Valentine's View: Eli did not have a good game on Monday. Maybe this is his way of admitting the circumstances affected him.
On if he’s concerned about the interceptions he’s thrown in recent weeks:
“Well obviously I had one last week on a good play, this week I had two. But I thought we did a pretty decent job the last two weeks eliminating some of those. So no, I’m not concerned about that. You’ve just got to keep competing, keep fighting. We’re kind of happy about getting all the receivers back this week, but we lost them again. But we’re just trying to work with guys and get back on time. When you miss a few weeks and all of a sudden they come back and hey, you’re back to normal, you’ve kind of got to regroup, get guys back healthy, get your timing back again. So we’ve just got to keep working. The good thing at least is since we’ve had some injuries, we have receivers who have been here at least a month or so who know what’s going on with the offense and they’ll be able to step in and play well for us.”
Valentine's View: Love the confidence. Wish he didn't make some of the confoundingly bad choices he occasionally makes.