Tom Coughlin or Eli Manning is on an even hotter seat a day after the Giants' Sunday night football loss to the Cowboys and subsequent comments from New York players.
Giants running back Rashad Jennings told reporters after the game that quarterback Eli Manning told him not to score on two goal-line handoffs at the end of the game that would have given the visitors a two-possession lead with less than two minutes left in the game, multiple media outlets are reporting. Jennings said he believed Manning was acting on the instructions from the Giants sidelines.
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"On the first-down play, I was told, 'Rashad, don't score,'" Jennings said, according to ESPN. "On second down, 'Rashad, don't score.' I was tempted to say, 'Forget it,' and go score because I could. But I didn't want to be that guy. But definitely, I was asked not to score."
The question now is about the fallout that could befall Coughlin or Manning -- whichever that faux pas falls on.
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"A head coach on the perennial hot seat, maybe one hotter than ever before, can't make a mistake like the one Tom Coughlin made Sunday night," The New York Daily News suggested. "And a quarterback, with the ink not dry on his $84 million contract extension, can't make the mistake that Eli Manning made, either. So in the moments after the Giants' gut punch of a 27-26 Opening Night loss to the Dallas Cowboys, Coughlin and Manning were right to each fall on his sword, both trying to take the blame and deflect it from the other. But the truth is, they blew it. Both of them blew it badly."
Leading 23-20, the Giants drove the ball to the Dallas 1 with less than two minutes left. The Cowboys had two timeouts left, though there was confusion on the New York side because one timeout the Cowboys called before the two-minute warning was rescinded because of a penalty on the home team -- even though the Giants refused it.
Still, a score would have given the Giants a 30-20 lead (including the extra point) and Dallas would have had to score twice to either come back and win or just send the game into overtime.
But someone on New York didn't want the team to do that -- the logic, perhaps being that the Cowboys would've had ample time to come back. Jennings said Manning told him not to score and believed Manning was getting his orders from the Giants sidelines.
"As a running back, it's really tough when they tell you not to score," Jennings said, adding he thought he could've scored on either carry.
"On one of them it would've been a grind," Jennings said. "But on the other, I cut the wrong way [on purpose] and found somewhere soft to fall."
Manning inexplicably threw the ball away on third down -- media outlets reported that the Giants didn't tell Manning to take a sack if he didn't think he could complete the pass.
A veteran such as Manning should not have needed to be told.
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