The New York Giants host the defending Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles tonight in the first of 15 Week Six National Football League games.
The Eagles are favored by a touchdown, seems right, given they are meeting a Giants team that has won only one game this year. The Giants also handed the New Orleans Saints their first victory of the season last week and are under the direction of a rookie quarterback. In recent weeks the Giants receiving corps has been depleted. Their best receiver, Malik Nabers, went down with a season ending ACL suffered during their only win of the season, a 21-18 home victory over the Los Angeles Chargers. Tonight, they are also missing another receiver, Darius Slayton is out with a hamstring.
So, run to the window and wager on the defending champs?
Well, the Eagles are confronting their own internal problems.
They lost last week at home, allowing a 17-3 fourth quarter lead to melt in a 21-17 loss to the Denver Broncos. In that game, the Eagles abandoned their signature run attack with more passes than they have attempted in any game in recent years. It didn't work.
“What happened to Saquon Barkley,” was yelled from the stands at Lincoln Financial Field while the much-maligned new offensive coordinator for the Eagles, Kevin Patullo, tried to appease a vocal receiving corps seemingly upset by the lack of a passing game. The most vocal wideout was A.J. Brown.
The offense that the Eagles ran to the Super Bowl triumph last season was orchestrated by Kellen Moore, who is now the head coach of the New Orleans Saints. Patullo has the tough duty of replacing someone as successful at his job as Moore. While the Eagles won their first four games it was not in decisive fashion.
They beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Thursday night season opener by four points, 24-20. Got by Kansas City in second week action by virtue of a dropped pass by normally surehanded tightend Travis Kelce at the goal line that resulted in an Eagles interception and led to a touchdown enroute to a three-point win, 20-17. The next week, at home, the Eagles were trailing the Los Angeles Rams 26-7 in the second half before making a furious comeback to take a 27-26 lead. The Rams got in field goal range, but on the last play of the contest had their potential winning field goal blocked and returned by the Eagles for a touchdown that ended the game with a score in the Eagles favor of 33-26. That score in no way represented the actual play on the field.
A win over Tampa Bay followed before last Sunday's home loss to the Broncos.
Having a record as good as any team in the league is what the Eagles can hang their helmets on and while only the New York Jets have a record worse than the Giants, one can understand why Philadelphia is a touchdown favorite.
Maybe they should be more.
At least that is how the bettors see it, and yet while the majority of the individual wagers are backing the Eagles, the books have shaved the line from 7½ to 7 points.
Why?
Because maybe, just maybe, the Eagles are a bad bet.
They beat the Giants twice last season, and this week held some high-stake meetings among themselves to try and figure out how to bend their coaches to their desires.
This is a very bad idea for a team struggling and one that has a reputation of being able to come undone no matter how much talent they put on the field. Two years ago, before their Super Bowl campaign last season, the Eagles folded up their tent midway through the season and lost five of their final six regular season games and only postseason contest.
Last year, they erased those bad memories with an impressive run that included turning a two wins and two losses season start to victories in fifteen of their final sixteen games and a trouncing of the favored Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX.
That was then, this is now.
The Eagles are not good enough to lay this many points on the road against a division opponent … but, before you then leap for the Giants, remember this, they are shorthanded and led by a rookie missing two receivers.
If the Giants were an average team I would be all over them tonight. Unfortunately, for us, they are a bad team with a coach that may not last the season. Can’t back them, don’t want the other team, and hate that a great motivational spot for the home team has to be left on the shelf because of New York incompetence.