When looking back on some of the greatest teams ever assembled, it’s easy to forget about the 2008 New York Giants. After all, they finished the regular season with a modest 12-4 record and were embarrassed by the Philadelphia Eagles in the divisional round of the playoffs.
Still, players from that team are tormented by what could have been…
Following a Super Bowl XLII victory over the New England Patriots a year prior, the Giants started the 2008 as hot as any team in history, cruising to an 10-1 start that featured dominating win after dominating win.
“That year, I tell people all the time, was the most fun I’ve ever had playing football in my entire life,” retired center Shaun O’Hara told the New York Post. “That year we literally kicked the snot out of people. I couldn’t wait to get to the stadium on Sunday, on game day, because we were that good.
“It wasn’t like we were airing it out, either. We’re gonna run the football. They knew it, we knew it, and there was nothing they could do about it. I know we won the Super Bowl the year before but we were a better team in 2008, we were a better offense in 2008 than we were in 2007. It was by far the best team I’d ever been on.”
Entering November, the Giants had hit their stride. They felt it was a mere formality that they would become back-to-back champions and had no intention of taking their foot off the gas.
“I think that was the best team we had,” wide receiver Amani Toomer said.
“Back-to-back,” running back Brandon Jacobs also told The Post. “We were easily better than every team in the NFL that year. Easily. I’m talking about a touchdown, I’m talking about 10 points better than everybody.”
But then everything changed…
Just prior to a Week 13 game against the Washington Redskins, superstar wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the leg with an illegal handgun while he and teammates were out at a club. He was rushed to the hospital and later sentenced to prison time.
That series of events was obviously more involved, but everyone knows that story. What they forget is that the Giants were cruising — they were unbeatable following a Week 4 loss to the Cleveland Browns.
That is, until Burress had his accident and everything fell apart.
“I think about it every year around the Super Bowl, because everyone talks about how tough it is to go back-to-back and had we won that year people would have started saying the [dynasty] word,” O’Hara said. “That’s how things would have changed. Who knows the trajectory of the franchise, how different that would have been for everybody?
“We still were a good team, but when we struggled to run the football or teams found ways to stuff us a little bit we really lost that go-to guy in the passing game. That kind of made us one-dimensional at times.”
“I thought if Plaxico didn’t shoot himself, we were the best team in the NFL that year,” defensive end Justin Tuck said.
Following a 20-19 Week 17 loss to the Minnesota Vikings, several Giants player recognized that the window of opportunity had closed. The team had resigned itself to losing.
“I think going into the playoffs on a loss like that was totally different than going to play us after a hard-fought loss against the Patriots the year before,” Toomer said. “I felt like we didn’t learn from what made us great the year before. I felt aside from Plaxico shooting himself, I think we dropped the ball in a sense, we took our finger off of the trigger and kind of let up. It’s hard to turn it on and off, especially at that point we had played so much football, we had the No. 1 seed, but still, you can’t let up. I felt we let up.”
In the end, the Pittsburgh Steelers topped the Arizona Cardinals to win the Super Bowl that year, which didn’t make the Giants any less sour. After all, they had dominated each of those teams during the regular season.
“Two teams we kicked the snot out of during the regular season,” O’Hara said of Super Bowl XLIII. “If we had beat Philly, the Cardinals would have had to come up and play us at MetLife, that would have been a disaster for that offense and Kurt Warner. If we had gotten past Philly, I have no doubt we would have beaten Arizona. And we would have beaten Pittsburgh.”
“That was our best team,” former offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride said. “There’s no doubt about it. We were good in every aspect. I think we could have won. Whether you do win or don’t win, who knows? But we showed we were good enough to win another Super Bowl, I don’t think there was any question about that.”
It’s draining to think about what could have been for the franchise — what Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning’s legacy might have looked like if things didn’t go off the rails.
Where would Domenik Hixon’s career have gone? How different could life have been for Burress?
Unfortunately, all that remains are the what ifs.
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