An Open Letter to the Carolina Panthers:

Dear Carolina,

I'm saddened about my team's sudden loss of a football season. While I could blame any number of things, including but not limited to:

• Eli's lousy throwing
  
• Eli's inability to do anything productive inside the red zone or anywhere near the red zone.
  
• Gilbride deciding to call plays that involved passes no shorter than 20 yards unless they were for Derrick Ward in the middle of a typical Giants Stadium wind.
• Gilbride deciding to call for an Eli Manning sneak on fourth down when you have a 270 pound beast at halfback.
• An illegal block penalty on RW McQuarters during a good Hixon punt return. This wouldn't have happened if McQuarters was busy trying to catch the punt.
• Carney missing two field goals.
• the defense coming up big early but coming up small at the worst possible moments a la the Strahan era pre-2k7, most notably giving up a 3rd and 20 for a first down.
• And about 15 other things that don't come to mind at this moment...

I choose to blame you. The Giants/Panthers game was going to determine whether the Giants, coming off relatively meaningless losses to the Cowboys and Eagles were still the best team in the NFL or whether they were going to continue the downward spiral that began with the slip of a pistol from a certain sweatpants waistband. After the win over your southern fried bitch asses, I got my hopes up that the Giants were destined for a Super Bowl appearance at worst. After all, the Giants just beat the best that the NFC has to offer, how else would they lose?

Well, Carolina, you were frauds. You guys, apparently, were as good as I thought you were in week 9, not week 15. And thus, I falsely got my hopes up for this Giants team even though it was fairly obvious that outside of this game, the Giants defense was good but not great and the Giants passing game was virtually non-existent. So Carolina, you got my hopes up about my Giants team, and for that, you guys deserve 10 years of 7-9 mediocrity.

Sincerely,

Devo

PS-It's fashionable to say that the Giant receivers aren't that good, and they may be right. But were they not very open for most of the first half? Maybe that says more about Eli than Hixon, Smith, & Co?