Flashback Friday: 2007 Giants more overrated than Cleveland Browns

The 2007 New York Giants should give Cleveland Browns fans hope

Take heart, Cleveland Browns fans, even though many of us are down on the chances of the team to go far in the playoffs and doubt the ability of the quarterback, we are nowhere near as crazy as the fans of the suffering fans of the highly overrated 2007 New York Giants. who beat no one, burned their QBs jersey, and yet, they won the Super Bowl.

Poor suffering Giants fans. The Giants looked okay on paper, much like the current edition of the 2020 Browns. For the season they were 10-6 and made the playoffs as a Wild Card. But they barely outscored the opposition, 373 to 351 points.

Worse, they only beat one team over .500 all season long. They beat the team now known as the Washington Football Team, 24-17, and that team was just barely over .500 at 9-7. That was their most impressive win of the year. Then they lost the rematch, by the way, 22-10.

When they played truly good teams, they were blown away. They simply could not beat the 13-3 Dallas Cowboys, losing to them by the embarrassing scores of 45-35 and 31-20. They also lost to the 13-3 Packers 35-13. These G-Men were clobbered by the 8-8 Vikings, 41-17. You see, the 2020 Browns cannot really compare to the 2007 Giants.

Ridiculously, the Giants played the Miami Dolphins, who were on their way to a 1-15 season, and narrowly escaped with their lives, 13-10. Quarterback Eli Manning was 8-of-15 for a pathetic 59 yards.

For the season, Manning, in his fourth year, led the NFL in interceptions with 20, while compiling only 3,336 passing yards. He ranked 25th among 33 qualifiers in terms of passer rating. That’s about the same as Baker Mayfield’s current rating, at 23rd overall. It was evident to the knowledgeable football fans of New York that Manning was never going to make it as a star quarterback like his elder brother Peyton. Eli just did not have it, or so it seemed.

It got so terrible, that the fans felt that they had no other recourse but to burn Eli Manning’s jersey outside the stadium to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with their team.

"“By the time he was more than midway through his fourth season — in 2007 — fans were so fed up they were burning his jersey in the parking lot outside the old Giants Stadium after a day of screaming obscenities at him from their seats.” —  Ralph Vacchiano, New York Daily News"

Nevertheless, the Giants found themselves, at 10-6 (the same record as the Browns that season, by the way), in the playoffs. But the Giants pulled off the upset at Tampa Bay, 24-14. Maybe that isn’t so surprising since Tampa Bay was quarterbacked by an ex-Brown, Jeff Garcia, who might have counteracted the Eli effect.

The next week, they had to play the mighty Cowboys, and this time there could be no mistake. But there was, as the Cowboys were able to gain yards but were forced into crucial mistakes by the Giants’ pass rush. Tony Romo passed for more yards than Eli, but  Manning’s QB rating for the game was 132.4 compared to 64.7 for Romo, capped by an interception to effectively end the game for Dallas. New York pulled off a stunning upset.

Surely, Brett Favre and the 13-3 Packers would restore sanity to the playoffs in subzero conditions and high winds at Lambeau field, perfect weather for the Packers. But in a game marked by missed field goals on both sides, they went into overtime, Corey Webster was able to intercept Favre to enable a 47-yard wind-guided field goal that made the Giants NFC Champions.

That meant that the overrated Giants, the team with the fan base that burned the jersey of the quarterback that same season, the team whose best victory was beating a 9-7 team. That team went to the Super Bowl to face Tom Brady, Randy Moss, and the big bad New England Patriots, who were 18-0 heading into the game.

Of course, you know what happened that season, a slaughter by New England, to cap the first perfect season since the 1972 Dolphins, right? Except that never happened. The Giants defense shut down Brady and the Patriots 17-14, and Manning scrambled away from a heated New England pass rush and completed one of the most insane passes in Super Bowl history, the “helmet catch” by David Tyree. Plaxico Burress scored the winning touchdown on a 13-yard pass with 35 seconds left.

Do you suppose, maybe the Giants team was not so bad as the fans thought? Not overrated after all? They did it again after the 2011 season just to prove it was not a fluke. Incidentally, the guy that they ran out of town before Eli was Kurt Warner, and he wound up taking Arizona to a Super Bowl. He’s now in the Hall of Fame. Maybe these quarterbacks should not be dismissed so lightly.

You have to admit, it takes a special sort of fan to run off a Hall of Fame quarterback, and then burn the jersey of the guy who takes you to the Super Bowl and wins the whole thing in that same season. Eli also belongs in the Hall of fame, but in any case, the orange hard hats of Cleveland fans should be tipped to New York Giants fans for being the most brazen of all fans.