Not with Kris Brown still available; his leg is much better.
Rogers had his share of bad ones. The tone of the game is completely different if he doesn’t totally miss a wide open Jennings on 3rd and 8 from the Giants 29 when it was 3-3, or the bad pass on 3rd and 5 from the Giants 40 in the 3rd quarter when it was 20-13.
It sure seems like people are close to penciling in the Giants for the Super Bowl. They’ll actually have to play a real defense next week. I’m thinking the 49ers will win a close one. For now, I’ll say SF 24 NYG 22.
Didn’t he play the next snap? Unless he takes a play off, you get charged a timeout.
That and the stupid hail-mary TD to me were the two biggest plays of the game.
That was merely a very good Giants performance and a horrible Packers performance. Bank it, the 49ers win next week. They are the better team, better defense, better running game, better special teams. Not a better passing game, of course, but one that is better than people think.
I couldn’t care less who wins from here on as long as the games are good contests and fun to watch.
However I’d still like to see urr… Patriots… choke. And I guess I’d like to see Niners win since there is some link to Bears (I didn’t care for Jim Harbaugh when he was with Bears) and they are a young enthusiastic team. There were years I used to hate SF for the sheer fact that they were so good for so long ( I didn’t hate Montana or Young). I don’t think many Bears fans would root for Giants unless they have a reeeeal good reason, like yesterday.
I can’t help growing to hate any teams/QBs with “over confident grins”. That’s why I enjoyed the last year’s sudden exit of Patriots tremendously as well. Although Rodgers handled that much much better this year, I enjoyed them being knocked out yesterday based on his hotdogging last year (having been a Bears fan for 4 decades and 10 of those years, a season ticket holder is besides the point…). Brady was much better in that aspect as well this year, I thought.
Huh, I didn’t think of that.
It was uproariously bad, but I hear what you’re saying. There was one view that was clear as day. My only explanation, aside from the Packers/Steelers NFL conspiracy, is that the refs for whatever reason didn’t have access to that angle in their booth (or the guy running the replay machine didn’t show it). If you didn’t see that angle, then you have to uphold the call based on a lack of evidence. Howevah, the officials correctly ruled the play a fumble on the the field until one of the refs convinced them to reverse this call. So, not only did the refs botch the call once, they botched it twice even though someone on the field saw it correctly. All this served to make it look extra shady.
The only shred of justification that I could possibly imagine, assuming the refs had the same evidence we did, is that Jennings’ ankle/shin/calf touched the ground before his knee did. This is one of those weird things you very rarely see that strikes me as completely nonsensical when it happens, either a tackler flexing the bone in the leg, deforming the muscle, or a foot becoming buried in the ground causing the shin area to somehow touch grass while the knee doesn’t. Personally, I think the ankle/shin/calf should be treated like part of the foot, but that’s besides the point. I didn’t see this happen in the review and I didn’t zoom in on it to check, but it’s the only possible explanation I can conjure since I’m 100% sure that the elbow, hip and knee did not touch.
I think I’m pulling for the 49ers too.
It’s a tough Final 4 for most neutral fans in the league. All 4 teams have had more than their fair share of success. The Ravens have only had 1 Super Bowl but they’ve been in a lot of postseasons and the relative lack of success once there is offset by their general dirtiness, trash talk and criminal element. That said, I love me some Ed Reed. The Giants are a NY team which is distasteful and they’ve won a lot of Super Bowls including one recently. The players on their team are actually pretty likable which is a bit of a surprise, but the NY plus lots of rings makes them too tough to cheer for. The Pats are the Pats. I can’t really hate Brady, but I can hate Belichick and their fans quite readily. Lots of rings, spygate and a general insufferablness of their fans makes them a non-starter. That leaves the 49ers. They too have been wildly successful, have a lot of rings and their fans can be a truly lame bunch of bandwagoneers who wouldn’t know which end of a goalpost is up when they are winning, but it’s been a long time for time and they have a little bit of the underdog stink on them. I’m picking them by default I guess. Plus I’ll happily latch on to Harbaugh’s Bears connection even if the Michigan/Colts connection comes along for the ride. Plus I loves me some Patrick Willis, and Vernon Davis was one of “my guys” coming out of college.
I think this is a tougher matchup for the Giants than the Packers were. The 49ers are a team that doesn’t love to throw the ball a lot, which should neutralize the Giants’ main defensive strength (pass rush). They also have trouble covering a large number of talented receivers (i.e. Colston, Henderson, Meachem, Moore, Graham), but have a couple good cornerbacks, so if the Giants come out in 2 WR + TE sets, the 49ers should have the personnel to cover them. The one problem for the 49ers is that the Giants don’t especially care about running the ball, and the 49ers are awesome at stopping the run.
I would expect a pretty hard-hitting, close game. Kind of like the one they had the first time around.
The 49ers beat the Giants this year by game-planning around what the Giants expected, the run, and focused on the pass. Since that game, the 49ers offense has not been very reliant on the run any more than any other team. That might play back into the Giants’ hands, but I expect a relentless, creative running attack this weekend from all corners. Fly sweeps, counter-off-tackle, toss-backs. Mix in some WR screens and a flea-flicker
One thing I’ve noticed in all the division round games was defenses seemed to be trying to create a lot of fumbles. Maybe I don’t watch as intently for it in the regular season, but the 49ers, Ravens, and Giants specifically tried to strip the ball a lot (and with success, too). I barely paid attention to the NE-Den game, but Tebow makes it easy for D-linemen to go for the ball due to his release. Nothing new with what I’m saying, obviously, but whoever creates more turnovers this coming weekend will probably be going to Indy. (Sorry - I feel like Larry King/Jackie Harvey making such a grand statement.)
Likewise (and I am a Packer fan). The Giants have been on a roll the past few weeks, and only a great performance by Rodgers back in December had kept the Pack from losing the first time they played. This game played out pretty much as I feared it would (although I had feared that the Giants would run a lot more effectively than they did).
Our defense had played poorly all year, but the lights-out passing game had meant that it wasn’t costing us games. However, I’d maintained, all year, that if we ran into a situation in which Rodgers had a less-than-great game, we could easily be beat. QED. 
I don’t think Rodgers played all that poorly. He had a lot of balls dropped on him.
Yeah, that’s generally true. He had a couple of poor plays (the miss on the pass to a wide-open Jennings is what comes to mind), but it was the dropped passes, and the three fumbles, which kept short-circuiting the offense. Probably more accurate to say that “if the passing game had a less-than-great game, we could easily be beat.”
The ridiculous fumble-that-wasn’t was equally big, in my opinion.
The best explanation I heard is that the ref is either incompetent or blatantly biased, based on the fact that the same ref was in charge of the Steelers-Seahawks Superbowl.
To clarify, you aren’t charged a timeout, but you are allowed to voluntarily take one if it turns out your guy isn’t hurt and you want him in on the next play. If you don’t elect to take a timeout, the guy slow to get up must sit out one play.
As stated, late in halves you get charged a timeout regardless.
The league has given an official explanation and they are trotting out the horseshit line that I predicted. Naturally they aren’t owning up to anything in spite of the well documented facts. They are however correct that the Fox guys screwed up their narrative, which is to be expected form Buck and Aikman.
That wss 1000% fumble and they know it. All the hand-waving and bluster is making them laughing stocks who haven’t been able to field a quality officiating corps in years.
Bill Leavy is from my area and many of my fellow high school refs know and worked with him. I just can’t see why he’s still working in the NFL.
In addition to the botched fumble call and the obnoxious phantom blow to the head called against Osi (while Eli got smacked around far worse with no calls) there was also apparently a bad spot on the Giants’ first drive in the third quarter, where (supposedly) DJ Ware made the first down yardage pretty clearly but then the refs inexplicably moved the ball back a yard and a half, forcing the Giants to punt.
I haven’t gone back to check the tape on this one, but most people screaming about the officiating are pointing to these three as roughly equivalent on the blatancy scale.