The simple answer is home study. The more complicated, psychobabble answer is that the Giants’ cornerbacks and safeties learned to trust one another and, in turn, be able to tell Fewell what worked and what didn’t.
“I have never had a unit go from that point to this point like this unit did,” Fewell said after the Giants reeled off a sixth straight victory.
“For me, it was really important to have the older guys tell me, ‘You don’t want to look like this,’ ” said Amukamara new england patriots super bowl xlvi jerseys, who missed extensive time with a broken leg and was behind much of the season. “I was trying to get caught up on the defense and my technique and all of that work helped.”
This was work. Aaron Ross and Corey Webster had been meeting most of the season at home to review game video, and they eventually were joined by Deon Grant, Kenny Phillips and Antrel Rolle. Then rookie Prince Amukamara showed up. Pretty soon, the entire unit was there going over play after play eli manning super bowl jerseys, trying to figure out what worked and, more important hakeem nicks super bowl jerseys, what wasn’t working.
This is the same defense that just two months and a day earlier was torched at home against the Green Bay Packers in a three-point loss new york giants customized jerseys, the team’s fourth consecutive defeat. Two weeks after that, the Giants’ secondary looked bad in a loss to the Washington Redskins with a series of busted coverages.
“That was close,” Phillips said when asked who had the best grub. “Those turkey burgers were good.”
Exactly what those X’s and O’s were is irrelevant. What’s important is how the Giants’ secondary went from toasted to the toast of the NFL, helping keep Brady and the Patriots under control for a 21-17 victory in Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday at Lucas Oil Stadium.
More to the point was how close the players got.
“We got tired of looking this bad, that’s what it was about,” Ross said. “We knew what the problems were. It wasn’t that we couldn’t play, but we were off by a little bit here or there. We weren’t reacting to the situations and the calls the way we were supposed to and we needed to get that straight and we had to do it amongst ourselves.”
The sessions went from one night a week to three or four. The players started bringing in food and drink. Ross’ wife, Olympic gold medalist track star Sanya Richards, made turkey burgers. Webster brought in steak and lobster from Outback Steakhouse.
Yet as the Giants limited Brady to only eight completions in his final 20 passes for 86 yards and an interception after he previously completed 16 consecutive throws, Fewell kept switching from man to zone to man again to something “we kept in our back pocket.”
As New York Giants defensive coordinator Perry Fewell switched time and again from one defense to the next, eventually confusing New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, a person with any sense of recent events would have called his moves the stuff of madness.
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