The most alarming thing about the Giants’ blowout loss in Philadelphia on Sunday night happened long before Victor Cruz’s season-ending injury. It occurred on the third play of the game when LeSean McCoy ran for 12 yards through the heart of their defense. And again on the next play when he went up the middle for 18.
To that point in the season, the Eagles running back had been a disappointment, averaging just 2.9 yards per carry. And if he can shred the Giants defense like that, just imagine what Dallas’ DeMarco Murray — the NFL’s leading rusher, by far — is going to do.
“It’s going to be difficult, no matter how you look at it,” Giants defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins said. “We’re going against the No. 1 rushing team in the league, and it’s not like they just did it with one big game where they got lucky. They’ve done it consistently every game. We can’t let them get push. We can’t let them control the line of scrimmage.
“It’s going to be a tough one.”
It certainly will be considering how difficult the Cowboys (5-1) have been to stop on the ground this season behind one of the NFL’s most dominant offensive lines. They’re averaging an impressive 160.3 yards per game on the ground, and Murray’s 785 yards are 243 more than any other NFL running back — the largest Week 6 lead by any NFL running back since Denver’s Terrell Davis (269) in 1998.
He has rushed for at least 100 yards in every game this season, tying Jim Brown’s record of six straight 100-yard games to start a season, set in 1958. And if Murray somehow keeps up his current pace of 130.8 yards per game, he’ll make a run at the NFL’s all-time single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards set by Eric Dickerson in 1984.
As eye-popping as those numbers are, though, they’re much more troubling after what happened to the Giants defense on Sunday night. In the first five games of the season, the rushing defense had been pretty good — in fact it was ranked 10th in the league. And the Giants hadn’t allowed a 100-yard rusher during their 3-2 start and the most they gave up to any team was the 124 rushing yards to Arizona in Week 2.
Then McCoy went crazy with 149 yards on 22 carries, part of the Eagles’ 203-yard rushing night.
“It was missing tackles, missing our assignments, playing out of depth,” Jenkins said. “It was just a bad game, and something that you move on from. But you can’t just completely forget about it. It’s got to motivate us going into this week because we still have big opportunities ahead of us.”
The Giants coaches agreed with that sentiment and expressed faith that their suddenly battered run defense would rebound against Murray, a back who linebacker Jon Beason called “the complete package.”
“Murray is playing extremely well,” Giants defensive coordinator Perry Fewell said. “His vision is improved, in my opinion, from years past. Obviously, the offensive line is a good offensive line, three number ones along the offensive line. The way they are complementing each other is going to be a challenge for us.
“But the way we have approached it and the way we have practiced the last day or two days, I feel like we can bounce back and do a good job in the run game.”
How? The key, apparently, is simplicity. What was evident about McCoy’s game is that he had humongous holes to run through at the line of scrimmage. Philly’s battered offensive line took the Giants’ defensive line right out of its gaps and, by extension, its game. Once McCoy — the man Antrel Rolle called “the hardest running back to tackle in the NFL” — got through to the linebackers and secondary, it became nearly impossible to keep him contained.
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With the Cowboys boasting an even better offensive line than the Eagles, the Giants must be much more disciplined and patient — even if that means forsaking a pass rush on Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo to stay in their rushing lanes.
“We’ve got to be disciplined in our gaps,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got to control the line of scrimmage. We’ve got to make sure we don’t allow him to get up to the second level where he’s able to make things happen.”
If the Giants do that, they can dictate which way he runs — either taking a longer route to the outside, or forcing him to turn inside into other tacklers. If they don’t, though, Murray may turn out to be far more dangerous than McCoy.
“If you want to be the best, you have to do it against the best,” Jenkins said. “They’re clearly the best running team in the NFL right now. We have to be able to step up to the plate. Hopefully that (performance last Sunday) gives us the little kick that we need to go out there and play the way we should play.”
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