A Giant Mess

On Saturday the New York Giants orchestrated a real coup in the NFL draft -- one of "the strangest events in NFL draft history" -- trading up for Eli Manning of Mississippi, rated as perhaps the best quarterback prospect to come out of college in the past decade. Then today they told Kerri Collins to take a hike. [Newsday.com].

Collins led the Giants as far as they could go with him, which, it ought to be remembered, was as far as the franchise had been in a long, long time. He is the only QB to have taken all the snaps for any NFL team over three+ seasons and produced some of the best passing stats in the Giants history. (Collins is second on the team's career list in completions (1,447) and third in attempts (2,473) and passing yards (16,875). He is fifth with 81 touchdown passes. He led the Giants to the 2000 NFC Championship, to the team's first SuperBowl in more than 10 years, and a 2002 NFC Wild Card Playoff slot. He started 67 consecutive games, two shy of Fran Tarkenton's team record, before an ankle injury forced him to miss the final three games of the 2003 season.)

With this record, Collins deserves better than he's gotten from the Giants. And Eli needs a year or two of seasoning, like any rookie QB, before he can possibly take the reins. As good as the bold move for Manning was, releasing Collins is a bad omen.

Now the real problem is the salary cap. As Mark Maske explains in the Washington Post:

So watch out, Giant fans, it looks like a rocky start to 2004 already.

 Posted by glenn