Giants End a Dismal Stretch With a Win Over the Ravens
By BILL PENNINGTONOCT. 16, 2016
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It was fourth down when Giants quarterback Eli Manning caught the eye of wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and nodded ever so slightly.
With the Giants trailing the Baltimore Ravens by 3 points, Manning and Beckham knew that Sunday’s game, indeed perhaps the Giants’ season, rested on a play called with 96 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter.
No two Giants had been more maligned than Manning and Beckham for the three-game losing streak the team took into Sunday, and as the two waited at the line of scrimmage, they watched as the Ravens’ defenders continued to realign. When Baltimore shifted once more, Manning changed the original play, signaling with his hands.
Beckham’s new assignment on the fourth-down play was to dash just a few steps from his right to left to ready himself for a short pass that would gain the 1 yard the Giants needed to keep their hope alive. Though it was one of their favorite plays, the Giants had not run it for weeks because they never faced the kind of defensive formation that made the play a sure success.
Then Manning saw what he hoped to see from the Ravens, and he made sure — with a look and an almost imperceptible gesture — that Beckham saw it as well.
Still, there was much to be done in just a few seconds.
Catching the snap from center, Manning looked away from Beckham, watching as both a Baltimore linebacker and nickel cornerback ran toward a decoy pass route on the left. A Ravens safety ran past Beckham, chasing Giants tight end Larry Donnell, another secondary receiver. Beckham, always the priority, was now alone with Baltimore cornerback Tavon Young, whom he quickly ran away from and caught a dartlike Manning pass at the Giants’ 40-yard line.
Beckham ran the next 60 yards into the end zone untouched, with three Ravens chasing him. When Beckham crossed the goal line, a dinky fourth-down play had become a lightning bolt of a score in a decisive 27-23 Giants victory.
The reeling Giants (3-3) had steadied a season teetering toward irrelevance, and Manning and Beckham, who earlier had connected on another long touchdown, had quelled the storm of criticism enveloping them since the Giants’ last victory on Sept. 18.
“It’s not always going to be easy; there are going to be lulls when you’re not playing great,” said Manning, who threw for 403 yards while completing 32 of 46 passes for three touchdowns and two interceptions. “We finally got some looks from the defense we wanted. Got the season back on track.”
Beckham, whose game-winning catch was for 66 yards, had a career-high 222 receiving yards on eight receptions.
“I kept the faith and trusted in Eli,” Beckham said in the Giants’ locker room. “Eli is the most prepared person I’ve ever been around in my life. He puts you in the right positions. I’m just glad it all worked out, because it started awfully bad out there.”
The late comeback was actually the Giants’ third in a game that could not have begun more inauspiciously for them.
Beckham fumbled on the team’s first offensive play Sunday. The Giants did not have a first down in the first quarter, when they fell behind by 10 points, a development that had the capacity home crowd at MetLife Stadium booing early and often.
Then, in the second quarter, Beckham jogged to the locker room with a hip injury. He returned just before the end of the first half and played as if the injury — called a hip pointer by the Giants — was of no consequence.
After the game, Beckham said otherwise.
“It was bad; it bothered me all game,” he said, and when he left the locker room, Beckham had a pronounced limp.
The Giants’ late-game heroics came at a moment when the team would have been forgiven for being demoralized and dispirited.
Entering the game’s final minutes, the Giants held a 4-point lead until a 30-yard pass-interference penalty on Giants cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie set up a 2-yard touchdown run by Baltimore’s Terrance West. That gave the Ravens a 23-20 lead with a little more than two minutes remaining.
The penalty on Rodgers-Cromartie followed a long third-down pass down the right sideline intended for Ravens wide receiver Breshad Perriman.
Rodgers-Cromartie was stride for stride with Perriman and had his head turned to the pass, which he batted down without having to contact Perriman, who was running behind him. When a flag was thrown, the crowd did not react, since it appeared the most likely result would be offensive pass interference on Perriman.
When the call went against Rodgers-Cromartie, the stadium grandstand erupted in jeers that lasted several minutes.
“That was a horrible call,” Giants linebacker Jonathan Casillas said. “Frankly, we showed a lot of poise to not let it ruin the game.”
And even after Beckham’s electrifying go-ahead touchdown, the Giants’ defense did have to make an extended last stand as the Ravens (3-3) moved down the field in the final minute. Baltimore advanced to the Giants’ 39-yard line, but the Giants appeared to have made a fourth-down stop with 15 seconds remaining in the game. A roughing-the-passer penalty on Giants defensive lineman Owa Odighizuwa, though, gave the Ravens time for three more plays.
But each pass attempt by Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco, who completed 26 of 48 passes but did not have a touchdown pass, fell incomplete.
The Giants, who repeatedly lost leads late in games last season, when they were 6-10, survived another close game. It made it easier to forget the first quarter, when the Giants had just 16 total offensive yards. The Giants did not get their initial first down until well into the second quarter.
A 24-yard second-quarter touchdown pass from Manning to the rookie Roger Lewis Jr. kept the Giants in the game, and Beckham’s 75-yard touchdown reception in the third quarter gave the Giants their first lead, which was pivotal.
That score was another play Manning changed at the line of scrimmage. Beckham deked a short pass route, then burst downfield. Manning was looking the other way again, or as he said late Sunday afternoon of the Baltimore defender shadowing Beckham, “kind of lulled the corner to sleep.”
The pass hit the fleet Beckham in stride. Another touchdown without being touched.
For a day, the two most important players on the Giants were again in sync. The relief was apparent on the faces of Manning and Beckham.
“It’s good to get things settled down,” Manning said. “We’ll try to keep it that way.”
AI
