NY Giants still have shot at NFC East

The Giants started 0-6, maybe you heard about that or read about it in the newspaper. The Giants have an offensive line held together by duct tape and prayer, their star quarterback threw 15 interceptions in his first six games, their defensive line has pretty much been on a paid sabbatical the first half of the season and, oh by the way? The Giants don’t have a win against an opponent’s first-string quarterback yet.

And guess what? They could be tied for first place in the NFC East two weeks from today if the stars - including their own — continue to align for them and things continue to break so right with other teams you want to take Coach Coughlin and Eli and them to Vegas, just have them stand next to you for luck at the tables.

Against all odds and laws of probability and historical references, the Giants somehow have a chance starting today against the Raiders — a team that allowed Nick Foles to throw seven touchdown passes against them last week — to prove they are nothing more than a bunch of overrated stiffs delusional enough to have a Super Bowl countdown clock in the locker room.

Of course if you’ve watched the season you wonder if Giants fans should be more afraid of the Raiders or, well, the Giants.

“We have to control what we can control,” Tom Coughlin said the other day, and the coach is right about that, maybe the only coach who could actually get his fans to believe his team could go from 0-6 to first place, even in a division that so far has been like the Division III of the NFC.

But here are some things that have happened outside the Giants’ control lately to give them this road to redemption, or relevance, in no particular order:

-The Vikings decided to start Josh Freeman against them in one of the worst Monday Night Football games ever played in any season.

-Michael Vick, brought back too soon by the Eagles, re-injured a hamstring about as sturdy as a swizzle stick so that the Giants could face Matt Barkley in Philadelphia, as Foles was still recovering from a concussion.

-The Cowboys couldn’t close out the Lions in the last two minutes of a game that maybe only the people who built the Obamacare web site could have messed up.

-Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone, two weeks before the Packers were scheduled to come play Big Blue at MetLife Stadium.

-The Redskins, ahead 10 points at halftime, couldn’t stop the Vikings from winning their first game in the United States this season.

-Oh, and did I mention that the Giants feel like the first team in all of recorded history to get three straight home games coming off a bye?

So, suddenly, the Giants at 2-6 have a chance to be 5-6 and at least tied with the Cowboys and the Eagles in first place in the NFC Least if the Cowboys lose to the Saints in New Orleans Sunday night, and if the Eagles split their next two games against the Packers in Lambeau and the Redskins at home.

Now, if the Eagles can manage to win two in a row, they’re in first place at 6-5 two weeks from now. But if they don’t, and if the Giants can beat Terrelle Pryor and then the Rodgers-less Packers and old friend Tony Romo, then there are three 5-6 teams tied for first and the whole thing will start to feel like an early Christmas miracle for Giants fans, even with road games left on the schedule against the Chargers and the Lions, and a home game against the Seattle Seahawks.

And why do Giants fans think that any of this is remotely possible? Because they’re the Giants, that’s why! Because they can win a Super Bowl because a sure interception goes through a guy’s hand and one of their wide receivers presses a football to his helmet like a sticky Post-it note.

Because they can begin a Super Bowl run another time from 7-7 because of a 99-yard touchdown play against the Jets.

Because they’re the Giants and over this roller coaster regime of Coughlin’s, they have been the most consistently compelling team in the sport outside of Belichick’s Patriots, even though the Patriots never started 0-6 even when Matt Cassel was their quarterback, and are in the playoffs almost every single year, which the Giants sure are not.

I am watching the opener in September, Giants vs. Cowboys, and it’s 30-24 for the Cowboys late. But Eli Manning has the Giants at midfield, and all Giants fans are thinking this is going to be another fourth-quarter comeback for him, his 25th or maybe his 250th, whatever it is.

My oldest son calls and says, “Doesn’t it seem as if we’ve been playing this same game for the last five years?”

It did feel exactly that way. Only this time a pass to a running back named Da’Rel Scott goes off his arm and into the hands of a Dallas defensive back named Brandon Carr and this time Eli and the Giants aren’t going to come all the way back. And before you know it, in this perfect storm of bad decisions and bad plays and bad luck and injuries, the Giants are 0-6 before they beat Josh Freeman and Matt Barkley, whoever they are.

The season was supposed to be over. If they lose today to the Raiders — you think they can’t, having to chase Terrelle Pryor around this afternoon? Get real — the season really is over, before they get to the Rodgers-less Packers and the Cowboys the Sunday before Thanksgiving. And of course to compare them to the Giants who won Super Bowls is ridiculous, they aren’t nearly as good as those teams, especially in both lines.

Maybe what is really ridiculous is that they have a chance like the one that starts today at 1 o’clock against the Raiders. There have been so many surprises over the Coughlin years, good and bad, the Super Bowl runs and the teams that fell apart the second half of the season. This time they fell apart in the first half.

Here they are, anyway. They’ve been such a bad team this season. And somehow things still might be getting good. Unless they lose to the Raiders today. And it turns out they really have been stiffs all along. Even when they’ve been lucky stiffs.

Locker room codes of dishonor, Knicks ain't sorry yet...
-You always have to love it when you hear the hoary definitions of manhood and locker room codes and all the rest of it that accompany a story like this.

Do we know everything we need to know yet?

We don’t.

What we do know already, though, is that the Dolphins and their coaches and their executives closing ranks this way was as predictable as the Saints doing the same after BountyGate.

Is this story going to have legs?

It is, stories like these always have legs when people are lining up on both sides, as if this is the NFL version of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.

But if you think that the solution to Jonathan Martin’s problems was acting like as much of a punk as somebody like Richie Incognito then you have rocks in your head bigger than the ones inside Incognito’s.

And then you had another dim bulb, Brian Hartline of the Dolphins, wide receiver, actually saying that he felt as if the Dolphins were being bullied by — wait for it — the media.

Hartline should go talk to kids who have been bullied in their lives, or anybody who has ever been harassed in a workplace that isn’t an NFL locker room, and then get back to us on that one.

Eventually, the default setting on a story like this and an issue like this is always the same:

If we never played pro ball, we just don’t understand.

As if the whole issue is way too complicated for us to process.

No, it’s actually not.

One more thing to love in the coverage of this story?

Media people, and that means from all platforms, print and radio and TV, who get hysterical if anybody says anything bad about them telling Jonathan Martin of the Dolphins how he was supposed to act more like a man with Richie Incognito.

-Did Raymond Felton, a good guy, really need to feel the need to apologize to Knicks fans after four games of the season?

I thought that all went out of style in the old days, after George Steinbrenner apologized to the whole city after the Yankees lost a World Series.

Somehow, after the Knicks were supposed to be staring into the abyss going into Friday night’s game against Charlotte, I pick up the paper on Saturday morning and am shocked to discover they now had the exact same record as the new basketball kings of the city, the Brooklyn Nets.

We don’t go from game to game anymore, no matter how long these seasons are.

We go from crisis to crisis.

-The Jets are good, they’re bad, they’re great, they stink.

Like that.

Coach Ryan and the guys are only safe from any dangerous mood swings this week because they don’t have a game.

I still think somebody needed to tell me when Bill de Blasio was running behind Anthony Weiner that he was really the power-forward version of Fiorello La Guardia.

-I know this sounds nuts, just because people were lining up to run Andrea Bargnani out of town after four games, but I actually think he’s going to help the Knicks this season, and that means even after Tyson Chandler comes back.

If the Yankees end up spending $200 million for Robinson Cano and as much as $75 million just for the posting fee on Masahiro Tanaka, you have to say that Hal Steinbrenner’s new austerity campaign is going great guns so far!

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The Mike Lupica Show can be heard Monday through Friday at noon and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN 98.7.