Brian Westbrook talked about the importance of commiting to the run.
"We were able to run the ball successfully early, and (Reid) stayed with it,” Westbrook said. "He was very committed to it, and I give a lot of credit to him. Usually, we're not that committed to it, but he saw that we were getting it done. We always try to tell him, "Two and three yards is not bad.' And we had a couple of carries that were just two or three yards. But he stayed committed to it.”
Did you hear that Rich Hoffman?
Tra Thomas confirmed that "it's the playcalling and not the players" idea.
"It's hard to pass all the time,” offensive tackle Tra Thomas said.
"If you keep pounding the rock, you might get three yards, then four yards, then no yards, but you might break the next one.”
Everyone wanted to talk about the new Eagles run game, including Sheldon Brown.
"Coach was trying to make a statement,” the Eagles Sheldon Brown said. "He took a lot of heat this year and he wanted to make a point of emphasis that we can be the more physical team and run the football.”
Sheldon also talked about how proud he was to have recovered the onside kick at the end. In fact, he kept the ball.
"Why did I keep it?” Brown said. "Who would think that I would be on hands team recovering the damn football? I’m going to put it on my highlight tape.”
LJ Smith played like the top 5 TE he is being paid like this year. His work after the catch was exactly the kind of stuff we hoped he'd do when he was drafted here.
"I'd rather catch nothing and win the game than have a great game and lose,” Smith said. "This is great but, at the same time, the headlines could be a lot different next week. So I'm not going to sit here and act like I don't know what's going on. I had a good game today but next week, if I don't have a good game, then the headlines could be something different.”
Despite two blocked kicks I said after the game that I thought David Akers looked really good. He agrees.
"This was definitely one of those games that even though I ended up 50 percent on the day I really felt like I had a really good day,” Akers said. "That probably sounds like the weirdest thing ever. Statistically it was an awful day, but I think overall I personally performed pretty well. (The Giants were) bringing it hard. The last kick, we stayed in strong and that was big because we went up two touchdowns.”
There's no doubt that the Eagles defense was embarrassed the last time they played the Giants and they came out yesterday looking for revenge. Jim Johnson.
"The memory was short from that last game,” Johnson said. "And we just said, ‘Hey, that wasn’t Eagles football.’ We’ve got to stay in the game. We have to win one series at a time. And they kept at it and they took this as a challenge.”
Trent Cole
"Definitely,” Trent Cole said. "Our defense definitely takes pride in the things that we do. We don’t like to lose, and we don’t like people to run on us and beat us down. We totally don’t. We want to go out there and be the penetrators and dominate our opponent.”
Giants' FB Madison Hedgecock gave credit to the Eagles D
"They had our offense figured out today, that is for sure," Giants fullback Madison Hedgecock said. "In the third quarter I looked up and we had 36 rushing yards."
Did the Burress situation affect the Giants? Amani Toomer implies that maybe it did.
"Oh, man. I don't know," said chronically honest receiver Amani Toomer. "It's probably our craziest week. It's probably our worst performance. You can put two and two together."
Finally Brandon Jacobs, who was banged up in the game, said he could have returned but didn't see why he should?
"Didn't cause any more damage to it, just a little pain," Jacobs said. "It wasn't frightening because I knew what it was, I do it almost every game, that time I just did it real good."
Jacobs said he could have come back into the game. "But why?" he said. "We couldn't get anything going and we didn't play as good as we're supposed to play."
"But why?" There's a committment to excellence!