Going into this game both teams were regarded as being questionable, but were a considered possibly playoff contenders. The New York Giants were coming off a disappointing end to their 2009 season, where they had big hopes to go further than they did. The Panthers however were suprisingly on the opposite side of things, coming off a disappointing 2009 season but with a winning momentum that had led them to beat some of the best teams of the league. Sadly that momentum came to a screeching halt during this first week.
So stats to consider for the game:
NEW YORK GIANTS:
- Manning was 20/30 for 263 yards 3 TD/3 INT- 118 yards rushing
- Red Zone Efficency 60% (3/5)CAROLINA PANTHERS:
- Moore was 14/33 for 182 yards 1 TD/3 INT- 89 yards rushing
- Red Zone Efficency 20% (1/5)
Now obviously there are tons of stats to this game and you can get more details on the stats of this game here. However I wanted to focus on these key stats for a specific reason.
The first stat that you see is regarding the quarterback position. A position that has been heavily scrutinized in Carolina for sometime. Now I am not going to get into the whole Jake Delhomme situation, that is for another post. But lets look at the quarterback position for this game, as some would say that Carolina has problems winning a game due to the lack of a franchise quarterback. Although I believe this plays into the situation, I do not believe this to be THE factor.
Eli Manning in this game made a total 6 more completions for a total of 81 more yards. I know, this additional completions and yards led to two additional touchdowns. But lets look at it this way, Eli Manning going into this game had a total of 87 NFL starts in comparison to Matt Moore's 8. I think it is safe to say that there should have been more than 81 yards and 2 touchdowns standing between these two. I am not saying that Eli Manning is not a quality quarterback and that Matt Moore should be considered on par with him; however I am saying that this is just one small problematic area that contributed to our loss, not the entire reason.
The second stat that I had shown was a rushing statistic. This is Carolina's bread and butter. It was just a season ago that "Double Trouble" had broken the record of two players from the same team rushing for over 1100 yards each in a single season. Yet we were unable to rush for over a 100 yards against the New York Giants between four running backs. Another part of this decline is because of the offensive coordinator's play calling. Unfortunately, as soon as we are down by a field goal or a single Touchdown, we abandon the running game all together and go to a pass game. Which is definitely not our bread and butter, as we only have one wide out that is anything to brag about. By abandoning this part of our game, we not only take away two of our biggest offensive weapons but we also limit the potential of our passing game. Now given our quarterback issues (listed above) would you not say that the play calling surrounding our QB should be better considered. I would say this is more of a contributing factor to our loss.Lastly, we do not capitalize on our red zone possessions. We were only able to get any points on four of our trips in the zone. Now we lost this game by a total of 13 points, if we would have got three field goals, we still would have lost, but it would have been a completely different game. This one statistic makes the loss almost unbearable.
Carolina has started the season 0-1 and handed the Giants an opening day win on a silver platter. Never the less, as always, GO PANTHERS!
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