New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin made his weekly appearance on WFAN with Mike Francesa on Monday. In the wake of the Giants’ 29-16 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles there was much to discuss.
Here are some excerpts of Coughlin’s chat with Francesa. Sports Radio Interviews has the full transcript.
It’s a huge issue for the Philadelphia Eagles that Michael Vick cannot finish games the last two weeks, so credit your defense for knocking him out of the game:
“He is an incredible player in terms of being able to pull the ball down. As we know only too well he will put the burden of everything on his shoulders and he will take off. Now we did get him to do that a couple of times yesterday and he put the ball on the ground three times as well as the interceptions. Jason Peters made a heck of a play to get one fumble back for them, but he is the kind of player that he is going to come out of the pocket. He is going to run the bootleg. They will keep him as they have done in the past. They will allow him to keep it and run. He will just pull the ball down and take off, so you got an awful lot of your defense focused on containment and push in front of him and timing and not allowing the ball to be thrown so far down the field. He does take a lot of hits and that’s just part of the game and the position.”You had Victor Cruz step up and make some big plays in this game. You gotta throw the ball up when guys are covered in this league and ask your receivers to go up and make plays:
“That’s kind of the way it was yesterday on that particular play. I thought Eli [Manning] did a real nice job with not only distributing the ball, but also making good solid decisions and getting the ball to people and not putting them into harms way. In this particular case he did trust that Victor would come back on the ball and he did.”
There seems to be a fine line between Antrel Rolle providing leadership and being out of control in these games?“Well let me just say this: He is a physical force. He’s down at the line of scrimmage. He makes a lot of plays tackling down close to the line of scrimmage. There was some back-and-fourth yesterday. I’m not going to defend or say what I thought really took place there, but one of the reasons that I had spoke to the officials was when I thought they had to be sharp at that point in time to keep the game under control because no one wants to lose a player because they get too emotionally involved. We had talked about this going into the game. As a matter of fact at halftime Antrel really came to me and said just all the right things about the second half.”