September 22, 2009

Beating Dallas was a good win for us. It was a nice new stadium, but we’re not out there to be distracted. We had a game to play and we had to focus as a team. We couldn’t get caught up in all the extra stuff that was going on. The ex-president was there, there were 100,000 fans, but it was just another football game to us and we were able to keep our composure.

We made some mistakes as far as our run defense, guys missed gaps and that hurt us. They made some big runs, when you make mistakes against the good teams they are going to capitalize. Marion Barber is a good back with good vision, he was able to hit the right gaps. And they have a very good front line. They did a good job keeping us off-balance with some misdirection runs, play-action, some bootlegs and a few screens. They never let us get in a rhythm for a pass rush. Luckily we were able to come up some big plays of our own like the interceptions.

When two good teams play each other it always comes down to a couple plays here or there.

I wasn’t upset when their coach called that timeout on the final kick. There’s no rule against it. It was just a good thing that Tynes came back and kicked the winner, that’s all I’m concerned about.

Tampa Bay is next and we have to make corrections and adjustments because Dallas ran for a lot of yardage, so you know Tampa is going to try to run it, too. They have a good O-line and good backs, so we have to go out there and shut down the run and give our pass rushers a chance to pass rush.

We’re not down on ourselves, we know what we have to do. The mistakes we made are easily correctible with a few adjustments.

Fred Robbins is a starting defensive tackle for the New York Giants. His blog for www.playerpress.com runs at www.fredrobbins98.com.