The coveted and magnificent Snoopy Bowl trophy is at stake Friday night
when the Jets play the Giants and it’s clearly the next best thing to the Vince
Lombardi Trophy for Rex Ryan. He just loves that thing.
The Giants and Jets never came close to allowing Big Blue Nation and
Gang Green Nation to even dream about a New York-New York Super Bowl at MetLife
Stadium back in February. The Giants started last season 0-6 and they were done
by Halloween, and the Jets had to scramble to just to get to 8-8.
Maybe nobody outside of the metropolitan area would have cared, but
it’s too bad they didn’t make it to the New York Super Bowl together. They
didn’t even make it to January.
But nearly seven months later, at least we have the annual Snoopy Bowl.
Thank goodness for that. Embrace it.
As a bonus, the Giants and Jets are undefeated in the preseason.
But the usually entertaining annual midsummer affair has too often come
with a heavy price and turned into a midsummer nightmare with so many
debilitating injuries to crucial players.
The next-to-last preseason game is the dress rehearsal for the season
opener with the starters usually going a couple of series deep into the third
quarter. Jobs are won and lost in this game. And when you factor in the bitter
and long rivalry between these teams, the intensity level always gets turned
up.
The fans love when they play each other — there is still something to
bragging rights — and that’s why the Giants and Jets should stop playing in the
preseason when it doesn’t count and the NFL should institute annual rivalry
games across the league and schedule the Giants and Jets to play every year in
the regular season. That concept was considered a few years ago but didn’t get
very far.
The Giants-Jets summer game has resulted in torn ACLs, broken wrists,
torn labrums and pools of blood.
Tom Coughlin and Ryan have plenty to work on Friday night — it would be
nice to see Eli Manning complete more than one pass and hit double figures in
yardage and just as nice to see the Jets corners make a play — but the most
important item on the agenda is to get their players out of MetLife healthy.
They need to be smart with their deployment of personnel when they play each
other, remembering how chippy this game has become in the past. Not that long
ago, the Giants and Jets practiced against each other in training camp but they
had to scrap those plans because the intensity got out of control.
Jim Fassel lost Jason Sehorn, one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL,
when he had the brilliant idea to let him return kickoffs against the Jets in
the 1998 game. He ran 33 yards with the opening kickoff and was hit by safety
Chris Hayes.
Sehorn tore his ACL and was out for the year. Fassel, in his second
year as the Giants coach, was severely criticized, but Sehorn had no regrets.
“I wanted to help our team out,” Sehorn said. “They pay me to play
football. They don’t pay me to worry about being hurt.”
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