If Antrel Rolle made good plays half as often as he gave good interviews, he'd be one of the best players in football.
Unfortunately for the Giants, he's just one of the best interviews. We learned that last year when he lambasted Tom Coughlin early in the season and we also learned that it is a trait that runs in his family when his mother gave an interview bemoaning how little fun Rolle was having in his first season with the Giants.
Rolle hasn't changed a bit in the offseason. On Monday he said that the team lacked urgency and energy during the loss to the Redskins, which was obvious to anyone who watched the game and unacceptable as an excuse for a putrid loss in the first game of the season.
Tuesday found him chatting on WFAN where he decided to try a different tack when it came to explaining away the loss.
"We as a team and as an organization, we know that the Washington Redskins is not a better team than us. We know that hands down. If we played them 100 times, they might win five."
It goes without saying that Sunday was one of those five, but it also should go without saying that the Giants team that was on the field last Sunday isn't close to being that much better than any team in the NFL. And even if it were true, who cares?
It doesn't matter who is better in some mythical Rolleian measure of football acuity. It matters on the scoreboard and only on the scoreboard.
Rolle was a major culprit in Sunday's loss as he was responsible for both a key fourth-and-five conversion and a mindless penalty in the second half when he speared a Redskin already on the ground. Both of those plays led to Washington touchdowns and Rolle was on the field for all of Rex Grossman's big plays, but that's okay because Rolle promised that Grossman will never have such a big game again.
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Promises of future retribution, protestations that you're the better team and talk about energy/focus/urgency/intensity that sound like either excuses or buck-passing onto other players from the team. Do these things sound familiar to anyone else?
The Giants have played these songs far too many times over the last three seasons for anyone to actually believe that they amount to anything other than hot air. It would be nice, just once, to hear a player on the Giants show some accountability for what went wrong and simply say that they will do better next time.
We know it won't be Rolle, but it remains a mystery if such a player is on the roster.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
