The battle for preseason MetLife Stadium superiority was, fans of both teams agree, exceedingly hideous.
Jets vs. Giants: Geno Smith, Mark Sanchez fail, both New York squads disappointed offensively
Both Jets and Giants fans wish preseason games didn’t have overtime, especially preseason games featuring offensive efforts as lackluster as their squads put forth Saturday night.
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For the Jets, it was a QB battle where the promising rookie threw three interceptions, each worse than the last, and ran out of the back of the end zone for a giffable safety, and the other quarterback got injured. For the Giants, it was an offense that did just about nothing after a game-opening touchdown run by David Wilson. And for everybody, it was an interminable affair that somehow ended up in preseason overtime, which is always on every screen at the sports bar in Purgatory.
Let’s just say having had to sit through that awful, unnecessary, dangerous overtime aggravated me enough that I’m tempted to break my own guidelines on the use of ‘colorful’ language. I won’t go there, but let’s just say that overtime in preseason games is a stupid thing that the safety-conscious NFL needs to get rid of.
This wasn’t pretty football. At times, you had to question whether this was football at all. This was funky. And ugly. Fugly. Yep, this was fugly. One fascinating-the-way-a-train-wreck-is-fascinating-how-did-we-possibly-come-out-on-top-in-this-farce kind of win.
(The title of that post is “QB or not QB? Uhh.... not QB,” which should win a dang Pulitzer.)
Geno Smith had a chance to stake a claim to the starting quarterback job tonight. He failed to do so. He finished the night with 3 interceptions and took an awful safety in the second half... Mark Sanchez again reminded us why despite his rawness, Geno Smith actually had a chance to win the job with a strong performance tonight. Sanchez didn’t play very long, but he fumbled away a perfect shotgun snap, made yet another high risk, low reward throw to a covered back, and got himself hurt by holding onto the ball for too long (more on this later).
The Giants went 3-for-18 on third down. They failed to score with a first-and-goal at the 4-yard line. The revamped offensive line struggled. Eli Manning doesn’t look comfortable. Brandon Myers is not having much, if any, impact on the offense. The Giants still haven’t scored a touchdown in the red zone this preseason.
“Whatever is going on, we’ve got to solve it and we’ve got to solve it fast,” Coughlin said.
The Jets won in overtime after Tom Coughlin’s first attempt at icing a kicker worked and his second negated a Jets miss, but did anybody really win here?
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