October 6, 2009

We’re looking good. It’s still a long season, but right now the Giants are doing a lot of things right and we’re looking good.

This is still the NFL though and anybody can be beat. Last year we were undefeated going into the Cleveland game and they came out and played their best game. We didn’t play our best game and we got beat. You can’t take anything for granted in this league, if a team has its back to the wall they’re going to come out fighting. Cleveland gave us a loss last year, and that one loss could have made a difference when it came time for making the playoffs.

We’re a good team and we’re doing some good things, but we still have to prepare for a fight against Oakland. Their record might not indicate it but they have some good players.

We have a mature veteran team and we know what it takes to win. The veterans do a good job of keeping everybody upbeat and keeping everybody working hard and focused through the week no matter who we’re playing. When you lose that focus because everything seems to be going well, that’s when things start to slide downhill.

This is a true veteran group and it’s what we thrive on.

As for Eli, from everything I’ve heard he should be ready to go. But if he can’t we’ve got David Carr who can step right in. He’s been around the league for a while, he knows how to perform and how to prepare during the week to win on Sunday. These things happen during the course of the season so no one gets too excited about it. Eli is our quarterback and we hope he’s good to go, but if he’s not we know we can still win.

Now in mid-season there’s not too much craziness going on in the locker room. No more rookie hazing or anything like that. The best we can do is make the rookies pay when we go out for dinner as a unit. But the defensive line doesn’t have any rookies this year, so maybe we’ll have to try to get Clint Sintim. He sits in on D-line meetings when we talk about rushing the quarterback, so maybe we can get him out for a D-line dinner and stick him with the check.

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