A Crisis of Confidence?

For a fleeting second there, I thought DE Justin Tuck was going to throw out that line from "Damn Yankees." You know, the one in the show-stopper "You Gotta Have Heart," where the player sings, "Things have gotta get better 'cuz they can't get worse."

Well, you'd be surprised how bad things can get in the NFL. Just look at the Jets today. But Tuck chose to take the third game of this horrendous losing streak with an optimistic outlook, almost hoping against hope that the team has reached rock bottom.

"Our confidence level was as low as it could be last night," Tuck said. "And then you see how the same guys responded in meetings today, I think the confidence is on its way up."

And why would that be?

"Man, it's going to be hard for us to play as bad as we have the last two games," Tuck said. "We have to go back up. I hope this is (rock bottom)."

Tuck, of course, is a glass half full kind of guy, anyway, so he obviously doesn't see how things can get much worse. But they can. They can give up another 40 points to another passing team in San Diego, only this time without the handful of batted passes they had against Donovan McNabb, if they don't get their coverage problems straightened out pronto. And perhaps this becomes the game where LaDainian Tomlinson, now a shell of his former self, finally breaks out for a huge rushing game.

Things can certainly get worse. And while the Giants are trying the best they can to keep the finger off the panic button, there's little doubt that at the very least their confidence has been shaken to the core by a set of losses that make Steve Spagnuolo's tough first couple of games as defensive coordinator in 2007 look like a mighty stand.

Coach Tom Coughlin said one of the worst things he's seen is the lack of resiliency on the defense.

"I am not real happy with our response to things, you know what I mean?" Coughlin said. "When we have a bad play as a team, we have always been very good and very resilient about bouncing back. It is almost like a challenge, the competitiveness.

"I don’t see that at this point in time and it is probably because something else would occur. These are all things that we’ve got to get a hold of, get control of."

It's not just the defense, either. Eli Manning looked shaken and confused as virtually every pass he threw was challenged by corners and safeties he never thought would be there. It all lends itself to a crisis of confidence, on which every man on Tom Coughlin's 5-3 squad has a different take.

Here's just a few of those on this video.

Manning said the confidence has to rise.

"You can fall into the fact that you think it's just gonna happen," Manning said. "You play bad one week, the next week you're just gonna play better.

"The way we played the first five weeks, it almost seemed easy. It isn't easy. It's not. Winning a football game in the NFL is not an easy thing. Sometimes you can make it look easy and win big, but there's a few plays every game where it's a win or a loss. You look around the league and you see the Jets, where Miami had 100 yards of total offense, yet they lose the game. We can't just go with the easy approach and say it's going to turn around. We've got to make it turn around."

Coughlin had only one approach to righting the ship.

"As I tell the players, we’re going to fight, we’re going to battle, we’re going to scratch, we’re going to do everything we possibly can to change whatever this situation we find ourselves in right now," Coughlin said. "Until we make something happen, until we’re the ones that make the plays. That is the only sign, that’s the only way to get out of this."

They'd better hurry up about it. The season is half over.

EP