Eli Manning Is Ready For Some Preseason Football

The very fact that the New York Giants are considering playing Eli Manning and the starters at all in the fourth preseason game tells you everything you need to know about the team. The fourth preseason game is typically a starter-free affair- a game for the bubble players to prove they should be on the team.

But the Giants offense isn’t content with their preseason performance and so they are expected to get a light workload in tonight against the New England Patriots. This is a quote from Manning from a Giants.com article by Michael Eisen this morning.

"Hopefully, (we) go out there, (and) work on getting a fast start,” Manning said. “Haven’t been (good) at that in the preseason. So in this game, we won’t have many options – maybe one series or two. So, hopefully, go out there and get something going. Get some first downs, move the ball, get a little rhythm, and then start getting our focus for Dallas (their opponent in the regular-season opener on Sept. 13)."

The goal that Manning has is to get something (anything) going in the preseason. The Giants have given fans very little to cheer about in the preseason so it would be nice to see the Giants do something positive in their last game before the games actually count.

The problem with this of course is that the Giants starters will probably be going against the Patriots back up players. The Patriots open up the season in seven days, they aren’t going to play their starters in a game where starters almost never play in the first place.

It is a losing situation for the Giants either way. If they perform well and go on a scoring drive to open the game, it was against backups- how much confidence can you get from that? If they perform poorly the Giants would effectively kill any confidence they actually have and would open themselves up for unbearable ridicule.

I get that the Giants want to find their offensive rhythm and I get that the defense has kinks to work out as well. But the time for working out said kinks has past. If the Giants really play their starters in the most meaningless of the meaningless preseason football games, that tells you a very damning truth.

This Giants team doesn’t even have the backbone to go into the season confident that they can beat the Cowboys. They don’t have the ability to call the preseason woes an aberration and move forward to prove all the doubters wrong. The Giants have to play their starters in the last preseason game to give them a sense superficial confidence.

I wonder how many teams are going to put their starters on the field tonight? I bet you that the good ones don’t even have their starting quarterback wearing shoulder pads tonight.

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