Bears at Giants: 3 things we learned
By John Buhler
The New York Giants defeated the Chicago Bears on Sunday afternoon in Week 11, 22-16. Here are the three biggest takeaways from this NFL game.
By pitching a second-half shutout at home, the New York Giants were able to improve to 7-3 on the season by beating the Chicago Bears, 22-16. The Bears sink further into an awful 2-8 on the year.
Here are the three biggest takeaways from the Giants’ 22-16 victory over the Bears in Week 11.
1. Rashad Jennings will be everything for the Giants offense going forward.
This is the most important thing the Giants have to understand this season. They have to run the football to be successful in December and January. Seemingly their only reliable ground game option is veteran tailback Rashad Jennings.
Jennings was a strong bell-cow back on Sunday. He had 21 carries for 85 yards and a touchdown. Jennings also came up big in the receiving game as a scat back. He had five catches for an additional 44 yards.
The problem is that Jennings hasn’t been healthy for most of the season. Paul Perkins isn’t reliable enough of a running back to positively impact the Giants on the ground game should anything bad happen to Jennings. New York is not going to win in the NFC Playoffs without a healthy Jennings. It’s a razor-thin margin for error offensively, but at least the Giants have one.
2. Jay Cutler really missed Alshon Jeffery in this one.
For as much flak as he gets, Bears quarterback Jay Cutler played a solid game before the game-ending interception. His quarterback rating was in the 90s before the pick by Landon Collins. Cutler actually played well enough to win, keeping pace with Eli Manning in this quarterback battle.
The problem for Cutler and the Bears was that they had no deep threat in the passing game. This was because unreliable vertical threat Alshon Jeffery got himself suspended for the rest of the season. Cutler could have really used Jeffery on Sunday.
For having pretty much nothing offensively on Sunday besides Jeremy Howard and Zach Miller, Cutler played well enough to get another starting quarterback opportunity. His time in Chicago is coming to an end, but he played significantly better than that dumpster fire of a game he had last week against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
3. The Giants defense is good, but New York is not an impressive 7-3 team.
While the Giants held the Bears to zero points on the second half, this is not an impressive 7-3 team in the slightest. A strong NFC team would have throttled the Bears at home with a raucous crowd working in their favor.
For whatever reason, the Giants have not had a distinct home field advantage this century. That might have a lot to do with the offense being too inconsistent to distance themselves from the opposition. Manning didn’t throw any picks, but the receiving game was all that spectacular: only 227 receiving yards through the air.
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New York feels like an NFC Wild Card team, as the Giants probably aren’t catching the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC East. Can the Giants win NFC Playoff games? Sure, but they don’t do a good job of putting bad teams away as an elite team should. This is a good team, but far from an elite one.