Giant Choices to Make on Offense

Baltimore might provide a blueprint of sorts for the Giants

Giants quarterback Eli Manning has no doubt that the team will be fine after their Week One loss to the Cowboys. 

"I think guys did a good job of coming in with the attitude, after the game on that Thursday, saying we’ve got to play better. But everything that occurred is very correctable and it’s just going to come down to fixing it, making better plays, better decisions during the game and… I think that was a good mentality," Manning said in his Wednesday media availability. 

It's been a bit difficult to understand why the Giants have been repeating themselves over and over about the "correctability" of their mistakes last Wednesday night. The team proved last year that stinking at one point doesn't mean you'll stink all year long, so you'd think that it would take more than one loss to get people all agitated about the state of the Giants.   

Former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel once said that, politically speaking, you shouldn't let a good crisis go to waste. The same is true of football. 

Last Wednesday's game reveals an offensive line that was mostly incapable of opening up holes for Ahmad Bradshaw and a running back that was equally incapable of bursting through the holes that did appear in front of him. Because the Giants chose to ignore it in the offseason, the offensive line is what it is at this point in time.

The running back position offers them another option, though. 

David Wilson is the kind of back who can make something out of the nothing provided by the offensive line, but letting him play means taking the risk of the occasional fumble that might be recovered by the opposition. The Giants weren't willing to do that on Wednesday, choosing instead to send a message that it is unacceptable to fumble -- after sending the opposite message by drafting Wilson in the first round despite a fumbling record that would amuse even Tiki Barber when he came into the league.

Wilson's only going to learn by doing, and the Giants offense isn't going to develop any kind of running game by doing the same old thing that hasn't been working for years. That's not the only suggestion we have for the Giants, but it is almost certainly the only one they'd even consider.

The other would be to finally realize that Eli Manning is a really good quarterback capable of running an offense as well as any quarterback in the NFL. He's a lot better than Joe Flacco of the Ravens, for example, but the Ravens trust Flacco a lot more than the Giants trust Manning even after two Super Bowl wins.

Where's the aggressive, up-tempo attack that we saw from the Ravens and several other teams in the first weekend of the season? Why are the Giants still acting like it is 1990 or like they have a defense that needs protection instead of taking their most talented offensive players and letting them win games? 

At this point, it's silly to suggest that anyone other than Kevin Gilbride will ever be the offensive coordinator so we know that there won't be an end to the 10 or 12 baffling play calls every week that make you wonder if Gilbride even bothers paying attention to the game when making his calls. It's frustrating beyond belief because there'd be no smarter move for the Giants right now than to put more on Manning's plate until they figure out how to make the rest of the team click.

Josh Alper is also a writer for Pro Football Talk. You can follow him on Twitter.

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