Overrated Meetings

At some point before Denver kicked the Giants around in their mile-high altitude last Thursday, fabled 36-year-old safety Brian Dawkins led a players-only meeting to invoke his team on to bigger and better things than a five-game losing streak.

Guess it worked. Or maybe was it because the Broncos simply got it together, played better, and outcoached a skidding Giants team? Would they have done the same without the meeting?

Probably. And proof of that lies with the Giants themselves. They've held players-only meetings, too.

"We have meetings and have done things," Eli Manning said yesterday. "It’s one of those things that we do at certain times. Just because one team does it doesn’t mean it will automatically work. Talking doesn’t always solve a lot of things. You just have to go out there and play well."

I have to agree with the quarterback. It's almost cliched now that teams hold players-only meetings when things start going south. A team leader gets up, makes some impassioned speech that goes something like, "Hey, guys, we're better than this." Maybe he does some interior decorating while he's at it. You know, rearranges the furniture a bit.

And then the team goes out and wins. Or, in the Giants' case, they go out and lose. See, it doesn't always work.

Although coaches often encourage their leaders to close the doors for these hand-holding sessions, I've found them to be vastly overrated on the professional level. Really, does any pro with a third-grader's attention span need to be reminded his team has lost a bunch of games in a row? Do people with seasons on the brink need to be reminded their season's on the brink?

The Broncos, of course, put great value in Dawkins' talk.

"It lets you know what it means to the leaders on the football team," cornerback Andre Goodman said of that meeting. "You get off to a 6-0 start, we have so many young guys on the team, you start to take that for granted.

"It lets you know what it means to Brian Dawkins. Opportunities are limited. This season is the only season that counts right now, so we were really throwing away a good opportunity."

They won, of course. Wonder if we'd have heard a thing about such a meeting had they lost.

The point is, the Giants would have to be awfully dumb not to think the same way at this point. Better to spend their time in the meeting rooms with the coaches and their living rooms with the cutups to try to figure out the myriad problems that have beset this team.

What do you think? Do the Giants need more players-only meetings?

EP