Spagnuolo's great moments as a leader:
New York Daily News
Mythbuster: Did '07 Giants really go all-out in finale vs. unbeaten Pats?
BY Ralph Vacchiano
January 14, 2011 10:54 AM
The Giants’ pass rush overwhelmed Tom Brady in Super Bowl XLII. They came at him from every angle and attacked him from the opening series right up until the last. It was a clinic, really, on how to stop the mighty Patriots and what to do to knock their Hall of Fame-bound quarterback off his game.
What I never was able to understand about that, though, was why the Giants chose to play Brady that way that night, and why all week before the game the Giants seemed so sure they’d be able to rattle him. Five weeks earlier, in what appeared to be an all-out effort to stop the Patriots from finishing the regular season unbeaten, the Giants’ pass rush was completely ineffective. They sacked Brady only once and watched him stand in the pocket, mostly untouched, completing 32 of 42 passes for 356 yards.
So after looking at that film of the regular season finale, what in the world made then-defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo think his defense could get to Brady the second time around?
“Well, I’ll let you in on a little bit of a secret,” Spagnuolo, now the Rams head coach, said from his office in St. Louis this week. “You know, as much as we wanted to win that game - - all of us did - - and we played it to win it, we made a decision defensively we weren’t going to jeopardize trying to win the Tampa Bay game (in the first round of the playoffs) by throwing out our whole game plan in the 16th game of the season. So there was a little bit of a pullback there.”
That certainly has been a well-kept secret, considering the Giants’ supposed, all-out effort against the then-15-0 Patriots is often credited as the performance that sparked their Super Bowl run. They lost 38-35 that day, but picked up tons of confidence, even though their defense barely provided a speed bump for Brady and the Patriots’ record-setting offensive machine.
The Giants did play their starters until the very end of that mostly meaningless game, risking their health just eight days before they’d open the playoffs at Tampa Bay. The players, in fact, were told they were going all-out for the win, and they may not have even realized how scaled back the defensive game plan really was.
It was scaled back enough, however, that Spagnuolo regretted the decision after he saw how close the Giants were to actually pulling that upset off.
“I remember as close as we got to winning that game I felt a little bit bad about not throwing a little bit more at them in an attempt to win the thing,” Spagnuolo said. “They were better than us that day and they should have won. But we did some different things in the Super Bowl that we didn’t do at all in the 16th game.
“I don’t know if that helped or not, but we’d like to think it did.”
Whether it did or not, I certainly found that “little secret” interesting when I spoke to Spagnuolo this week for an article that appeared in the Daily News special section on the upcoming Jets-Patriots playoff game. Mostly, I talked with “Spags” about how to attack a Brady-Belichick team. But we also spent some time reminiscing about that magical Giants Super Bowl run.
Not surprisingly, Spagnuolo said the scheme didn’t have nearly as much to do with the Giants’ big upset as did the “good players and great leadership” that memorable team had.
“It’s funny, I’ll go back down memory lane for you,” Spagnuolo said. “I remember being at our team hotel. It might have been before Game 5. We were 2-2, we had just won a couple of games, and I remember saying to the defense ‘How many guys in here have been to the playoffs?’ A number of guys put their hands up. ‘How many guys have been in a Super Bowl?’ I put mine up, Michael Strahan put his up and Peter Giunta put his up. I’m not sure, there might have been (others). But there weren’t very many hands. I said to Pete and Mike, ‘Did you ever get to the Super Bowl by winning one or two games?’ Of course the answer was ‘No.’ The point was there was a lot of work to be done.
“But I remember when I went through that exercise that there weren’t a lot of hands up for playoffs or Super Bowl, but the key ones were up there. There were some coaches that had been there, Strahan had been there. Antonio Pierce had been to the playoffs. Sam Madison had been to the playoffs. And I do think that carried us when we went in as a 10-6 wild card team with really no expectations from anybody outside our building and helped us eventually win the thing.”
It also helped, he said, that the Giants gained some confidence with their near-win in the regular-season finale. It doesn’t matter how scaled back the game plan was. The key players in Super Bowl XLII were in there until the end and left the field convinced they’d beat the Patriots if they were fortunate enough to play them again.
“I remember Justin Tuck and I walking off the field and he said, ‘Coach, I sure do hope we get a chance to play them again,’” Spagnuolo recalled. “That’s just the way he felt and I thought it permeated through the team. And when we did get a chance, our guys as players took advantage of it.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/gia...-unbeaten-pats