By PAUL SCHWARTZ
Posted: 2:57 am
August 14, 2008
ALBANY - There was a time not long ago when the dominant Giant at the tight-end position could not entirely be trusted to provide an accurate depiction of what he was dealing with on the field.
Jeremy Shockey gave the Giants much. Reality was not always high on the list.
"I remember we had a guy here once, I won't call his name, but he would come out of the game and say, 'There's a guy head-up on me, there's a guy outside, there's a guy inside and there's another guy stacked behind him,'ñ" tight ends coach Mike Pope said. "Well, I said there aren't four guys covering you, I can tell you that."
It's tough when the most talented and experienced cannot tell it like it is. Some of what Shockey dished out is not missed. But down the stretch of the first training camp in seven years without Shockey, the Giants have been noticeably subdued on offense as they wind their way through one practice to another.
Coach Tom Coughlin's insistence that his offense "turn it up a notch" is certainly not alarming, but there's no doubt subtracting Shockey from the mix changes a dynamic, not necessarily in a positive way.
Sending Shockey to the Saints was deemed to be addition by subtraction, given the front office's fear that Shockey's bitterness would have infected those around him. But what about on the field? Thus far, those left behind to carry the load haven't exactly soared beyond expectations or created much in the way of confidence that the tight-end position is going to be just fine.
"That's the assumption, that we can't do it," admitted Michael Matthews. "I'm not going to say I'm better than Jeremy Shockey or anything. I played all last season, Kevin [Boss] played, they were able to see what we were capable of. Obviously they believe in us to a certain extent. We played, we won the Super Bowl, we can't be too terrible."
The performance of the tight ends in the preseason-opening loss to the Lions wasn't classified as terrible by Coughlin, but it wasn't lauded.
"An average performance," he said. "That position can play better."
As Shockey's replacement in the starting lineup, Boss catches everything thrown his way and should be an adequate downfield threat, but his height (6-foot-6) makes him a sometimes awkward blocker.
Matthews as a rookie last season suffered a dislocated left shoulder in the opening game and estimates it popped out of the socket eight or nine times. "It comes out during one series, you got to put it back in and go right back out there," Matthews said. "It wasn't pain when it would come out, it was pain when it was going back in."
Matthews did not do much pass-catching or in-line blocking at Georgia Tech and is slowly progressing in both areas. Darcy Johnson would have made the team as a rookie last year but blew out his knee in camp and spent the season on injured reserve. He owns one more Super Bowl ring than games played in the NFL and has the size (270 pounds) but has not yet shown the aggressiveness he displayed before his injury.
In his 26th year of NFL coaching, Pope is confronted with the challenging assignment of offsetting the loss of Shockey with three unproven youngsters (Johnson is 25, Boss and Matthews are 24). A combination of Yoda and Yogi, Pope colorfully describes his chore as "trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose" and jokes, "None of them can rent a car, none of them are old enough."
Getting this group in gear is no laughing matter, though.
"You got stuff going on everywhere, so where do you start?" Pope asked. "We have a lot of things to fix there, but it's exciting and it's encouraging."
