Shooting the Moon

When you play hearts, there are 26 points for each hand. Each heart is worth a point and the Queen of Spades is worth 13 points. The object of the game is to come away with as FEW points as possible. So everyone is busy dumping the Queen of spades and ducking tricks to take in as few points as possible. But there is one wrinkle in hearts that makes the game very good… if you can manage to take ALL 26 points, you “shoot the moon,” and then give everyone else 26 points (or subtract 26 from your score) when you succeed. It is aggressive- but if you are going to lose, you might as well lose while going down FIGHTING.

And so goes it in football, where you can take some chances at an opportune moment and shoot the moon, trying to win a championship title. It is more about attitude than anything else.

YOU CAN ONLY LOSE THE GAME ONCE.

YOU CAN ONLY LOSE YOUR SEASON ONCE.

TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT. GO DOWN SWINGING. SHOOT THE MOON.

And so it came to be that the 1990 Giants lost their first string QB and everyone knew that the 13-3 team was a little less than the best of the best. They had lost to the Bills, Eagles and defending Super Bowl Champion 49ers during the regular season, so there were more than a few obstacles to winning a title. Each team made the playoffs.

And then came the words of Everson Walls. It was an epiphany for me as a fan. He said: bring on the Eagles, we lost to them, bring on the 49ers, we lost to them, and bring on the Bills, we lost to them. Let’s play all three this postseason and go through all of them.

It was brash. It was liberating. And it was necessary. This was Walls’ version of shooting the moon. Take’m all on.

The Giants are 11-2 and we have theorized that perhaps the only team which still has the secret sauce for beating the Gmen is the Dallas Cowboys. Romo takes an above average offensive line and buys time, making the Dallas OL seem that much more effective. A Pro Bowl TE in Witten is the Giants achilles heal. We have seen this year that when a QB playing the Giants has time, our LBs/DBs look mediocre. If there is any team out there who has that Kryptonite, we believe it is Dallas. Do not be fooled by the mistakes, they will be a lot to handle. They were beating the Steelers IN PITTSBURGH with 7 mins left, 13-3, without Marion Barber, before they imploded. So do not underestimate them. BTW, for those of you who do, they are giving free money away (no they aren’t), the Giants are +3 point UNDERDOGS.

BRING ON THE COWBOYS.

Road warrior special. Time to prove the naysayers wrong. People are already talking about how too many people have been lost from the Roster (Umenyiora, Burress etc..) for the Giants to hold it together. They will be proven wrong.

Knock them out of the playoffs this weekend. And if they make the playoffs anyway, knock them out of the playoffs again. The Cowboys will be a 5 or 6 seed as wildcards, they win their first game and likely will play the Giants as 1 vs 5/6 seed, the same way the Giants played Dallas last year. Everyone is thinking, the payback game, the media will be all over this one if it plays out that way, except this time you welcome it, you do not want it any other way. Why? Because you want to play the teams who are most capable. Think about it. When the Giants won their three Super Bowls they always had a tough road. In ’86, the 49ers were arguably the best of the rest. And the Giants had already beaten the Skins twice that year, so the conventional wisdom was that it would be hard to win three times, yet they did. The road to Super Bowl XLII was through TB, DAL, sub zero GB and the 18-0 Patriots.

Do not duck Dallas, now or ever. Make your path as hard as it has to be in order to win a championship. Let others duck the Giants.. those teams will not even face the Gmen because they will lose before that. Bring on Dallas this weekend and AGAIN in the playoffs. If we do not get them because they fall apart beforehand, bring on someone else.