Almost caught up on my football. Last night we watched the Giants / Seahawks game.

Holy crap. What a beating. Not exactly the most suspenseful contest we’ve seen this season, but there is a certain rough pleasure in watching your guys just whale the tar out of another team. And it certainly beats being on the losing end of such of a pounding, as the G-Men were several times last year down the stretch.

Honestly, it looked to me as if the Seahawks just stopped playing about halfway through the second quarter. If so, that’s worrisome for you Seattle fans. I remember when Pete Carroll coached the Jets. Only one season. The team just quit on him after the infamous Marino fake spike game. Maybe Carroll really is better suited to the college game.

I have to believe that Seattle is not nearly as bad as they looked. I’d like to believe that the Giants are as good as they looked… but I don’t, not really.

It was a terrific game for Eli and his receivers, though. That long TD pass to Nicks was a thing of beauty, as was the thread-the-needle pass to the double-coevered Kevin Boss. And the RBs kicked some ass too — Ahmad Bradshaw, Brandon Jacobs, even Danny Ware. Though by the time that Ware came in, the ‘Hawks were playing two-handed touch. The Giants D also looked great, though given how quickly the score got lop-sided, we probably should have had more sacks. Poor Whitehurst was passing on almost every play.

Kudos to Tom Coughlin too. To my mind, he coached the blowout exactly right. He took out Eli and the starting RBs right at the beginning of the fourth quarter, and instead of trying to run up the score he just ran the ball straight into the line with Ware for play after play after play to chew up the clock and end the massacre. Even at the end, with the Giants inside the Seahawk ten, he had Rosenfels kneel down four times rather than push in another TD. That, to my mind, is sportsmanship… and stands in sharp contrast to the crap that Evil Little Bill was pulling when he had his 18-1 team and set all those scoring records. Let the other guy leave with a little dignity.

Still have Giants/ Cowboys II and Jets/ Browns to watch. Then we’ll be caught up. But of course there are two new games tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in Westeros, I am wrestling with krakens.

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Watched two of my TIVO’d Jets games last night after work — the disheartening 9-0 shutout loss to the Packers, and the rather surreal overtime win against the Lions.

Gak. A split isn’t bad and Gang Green’s season record is certainly good enough at the point in the season I have now reached (still a week or so behind real time), but the Jets offense looked wretched in both games. The Packers have a good defense but not so good that they should have been able to keep the Jets off the scoreboard entirely (admittedly, they were aided by two bogus “interception” rulings on what were actually completed passes where the receiver was stripped of the ball while lying on the ground).

And the Lions game… the Lions are a lot better, definitely a team on the rise, and they pretty much dominated the Jets that entire game, except for a freak one-play TD bomb near the end of the first half. With less than four minutes left in the game, they had a seemingly insurmountable ten-point lead… and then they proceeded to give the game away. An absurd play call on the last Lions possession (a pass, when they should have run to chew up another thirty seconds off the clock) and a late hit out of bounds were the two big factors. Hey, it was a rousing come-from-behind victory, but I’m not going to delude myself that it means much. A better team than the Lions would have nailed us to the ground.

Packers and Lions both found a chink in Gang Green’s defensive armor. With Revis and Cromartie on the corners shutting down the sidelines and their top wideouts, both teams exploited the middle of the field and the matchup of their third receiver against our third DB, and had great success. Something Rex needs to work on.

Meanwhile, the Jets offense seems to have regressed badly over the bye week. Mark Sanchez especially. His accuracy and timing were way off in these two games. Of course, he wasn’t helped by receivers dropping balls all over the field… not to mention getting mugged by Packer defenders when they DID catch a pass.

Too many penalties too. Sloppy, sloppy.

But hey… they’re 6-2 as far as I’ve watched, and tied with the Pats for the AFC East. And these are things that can be fixed. I hope.

Tonight it’s the Giants/ Seahawks game for us.

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