The New York Giants could not have handled the final two minutes of their loss to the Dallas Cowboys any worse Sunday night. As if it wasn’t already bad enough, running back Rashad Jennings said the following day that he was instructed not to score on New York’s final drive.
A touchdown would have given the Giants a 30-20 lead with less that two minutes remaining. Jennings says he was told by Eli Manning to not score in order to use more clock, as the Giants believed the Cowboys were out of timeouts when they actually had one left.
In his weekly column for the New York Post early Wednesday morning, Jennings apologized for throwing Manning under the bus.
“First of all, let me say that I want to apologize from my heart for the negative light that I unintentionally cast my quarterback and friend Eli Manning in,” Jennings wrote. “I continue to have the utmost respect for him, and I have complete trust in his leadership. It is a strange and unwelcome feeling I have that after all these years as a professional football player, I finally get to experience the other side of how words can be misconstrued.”
Jennings said he also apologized to head coach Tom Coughlin, who took the blame on Sunday for another boneheaded decision the Giants made on their last drive.
“As professional competitors, our deep-rooted desire to win is usually our best friend. It can drive us to leave everything out there on the field,” Jennings added. “But sometimes, if we are not careful, it can consume us enough to lead us, in the heat of a moment, to say things that only our souls should hear.”
Manning struggled mightily to explain how the Giants screwed things up in his interview with WFAN’s Mike Francesa on Tuesday. He would have had to answer those questions even if Jennings didn’t reveal that he was told not to score, but the running back’s comments certainly didn’t help.
Coughlin and Manning have been around long enough to know they blew it. Even if the Giants thought the Cowboys had one timeout left, why did they care? The right move would have been securing the two-possession lead instead of trying to get cute. A guy who gets paid this much money is supposed to know that.
