… and put me out of my misery.

The Giants game was one of the most excruciating defeats I have ever experienced, right up there with the playoff losses in past years to the 49ers and Vikings.

Life is meaningless and full of pain.

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Back at home with the NFL. But weekends like this wear me out.

The Jets game was a horror. Bad enough that they lost to a mediocre Miami team they should have dominated. It was how they lost. Sanchez seems to have reverted to his rookie ways, throwing INTs every time he had the ball. Santonio dropped a sure TD. I think the Patriots game has robbed Gang Green of their mojo, which does not bode well for the remainder of the season, with the Steelers and the Bears coming up. I am starting to have flashbacks to the great collapse of ’86. Rex, Rex, work your magic, I can’t take that again.

As for Big Blue, well, the Giants thumped a lifeless Vikings team playing without Brett Favre. The defense and the running game looked good. Eli, not so much. Two terrible INTs right out of the box. And now we have to play the Eagles on a short week. We haven’t beaten the Eagles in what seems like decades. Time to end that streak. But if Eli keeps throwing the ball to guys in the wrong color jersey, it won’t be easy.

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I don’t want to talk about it…

… except to say that Evil Little Bill showed once again what a vile thing he is. The guy has no concept of the meaning of “sportsmanship.” He’s a great coach, can’t deny that, but he’s also a nasty piece of work.

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Kicking ass and taking names!

(Of course, it was only the Potomac Drainage Basin Indiginous Persons. Gets tougher the next three weeks. And that interception by Eli was worrisome. A lot of his INTs this season have not been his fault; he’d put the ball right on the receiver’s hands, only to have it bounce off into the hands of a defender. But that endzone INT was insane. He threw right into the middle of three defenders).

The running game looked great. And Derek Hagen stepped up big. I still want my Steve Smith and Hakeem Nicks back, though.

Jason Pierre-Paul is starting to show why the Giants drafted him. Good pick. Especially if Kiwi can’t come back from his neck injury.

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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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Life is magical… but kind of crazed at the moment.

I am off to Ireland at the crack of dawn tomorrow, but I took the morning off from packing and the usual last-minute madness to watch the Giants game, a thoroughly dominating win over the Houston Texans on their home turf. Don’t have the time or energy to post about this one in detail… but the game was not nearly as close as I expected. The Giants D looked awesome. Not as many sacks as against the Bears, but they kept the pressure on Texan QB Matt Schaub all game, and completely shut down the NFL’s leading rusher (he won’t be leading after this week, I think). The offense looked pretty good too, except for two awful (and completely unnecessary) picks by ELi in the third quarter. Great game from Hakeem Nicks. For some reason the Texans never seemed to cover him.

That’s it for football for me until mid-November. TIVO will record all the games between then and now for me to watch when I get back.

And now I’m off to ravage Eire and besiege Malta. Later.

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Life is magical and full of joy.

Nice wins by both the Jets and Giants yesterday left me feeling jolly by night’s end. (And believe me, I could use it. I still can’t shed the last dregs of the crud I got on the way back from Australia, the Irish trip is bearing down like a freight train, and for whatever reason I am sleeping very poorly of late).

The Jets beat Buffalo pretty much every way one team can beat another. Offense, defense, throwing, passing, you name it. Well, okay, it was only the Bills, and they look pretty woeful this season… but this is the sort of game that the Same Old Jets of years past would have blown, coming off their emotional, hard-fought victory over Miami the week before. The Jets of old were infamous for losing games they should have won. Sanchez is showing real signs of improvement, the D was solid, and the running game showed up big time. Congrat to LaDainion Tomlinson, who ran like a mother and seems to have found the fountain of youth. Shonn Green got 100 yards as well, and we even had a Joe McKnight sighting (though I still miss little Leon). And next week we get Santonio Holmes back! That should make the O even more formidable.

The Giants game was much closer. I love good defense and I got plenty of it in this night game between two of the NFL’s most storied old-time franchises, the G-Men and the unbeaten (previously) Chicago Bears. Ten sacks, and there could easily have been more. Both Jay Cutler and his backup Todd Collins knocked out of the game, leaving someone named “Caleb Hainie” as QB of the Bears. “Caleb Hainie” sounds like a character out of PETTICOAT JUNCTION, but actually he outplayed both Cutler and Collins in his brief stint. Even so, the game was in doubt well into the fourth quarter. The Bears D, while not as sack-happy as the NY D, was equally stout, and Eli and the boys could not seem to get anything going. All those three-and-outs were especially galling since out new punter really sucks (where have you gone, Jeff Feagles? Manhattan turns its lonely eyes toward you!), so every exchange worsened our field position.

For most of the game the G-Men clung by their fingernails to a 3-0 lead, knowing that one good Bears play was all it would take to put them behind. But finally in the last quarter, to my relief, Eli and Ahmed and Hakeem Nicks made some plays, and the G-Men survived a couple of bad fumbles, scored a pair of touchdowns, and put this one away. Whew.

The Jets have the Vikings next week. The G-Men have to face the red-hot Houston Texans. Uh-oh. We better come to play for that one. Meanwhile, I have a week to savor these wins.

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