Eli Manning, 11.15.10

Q: The day after the loss, how frustrating is it?
A: I was more frustrated yesterday. You see the film and you see a lot of missed opportunities. You can look at it both ways. You're doing a lot of good things, and if we don't hurt ourselves - you can't jump offsides on the two-yard line. Because of that, we get an interception and a few plays later, they go 101 yards. That's a 14-point swing. There are a few other things down in the red zone, just not productive early in the game. It's hard to come back from some of those plays. We fought back, hung in there, kept competing and going down, and hoping in the second half being down twenty points that we'd score and get back things. It's kind of tight going back down twenty but we kept fighting, and we had some chances. That holding call, if that doesn't get called, then we're down by six with seven minutes left in the game. We kind of feel like we're going to win this game, but a couple bad plays here and there hurt us.

Q: As it stands now, there are only three healthy receivers. What happens now going forward here?
A: Guys have to stay healthy. We need those three to stay healthy. Hakeem is playing great, Mario played well in the game. He's got some explosiveness and some playing experience, but we're moving him around. Obviously Duke Calhoun is talented and he's a guy who we have been giving him playing time these last couple of weeks because he's earned that job and that privilege to get in there. A lot of it has been on running plays, so he's a rookie getting his feet wet a little bit. He can run routes, he's fast, he's got good hands, and he's going to be thrown to the wolves a little bit. He's got to step up and he has to play well for us.

Q: Pretty tough divisional stretch coming up, what's the team's approach?
A: When you play Philly, you have to play perfect. Everybody has to be on the same page and everybody has to see things the same way. Routes have to be perfect, and the offensive line has to know who they're blocking and be ready for their blitz packages and everything they're doing. You can't afford to make mistakes, and when we get opportunities, we have to run with them and take advantage.

Q: A lot of guys chock this loss up to a ‘bad day', do you think there should be more anger or disgust?
A: No. As football players, you never want to lose your confidence. That's something that's always very important. Sometimes you can say that and you can say ‘Hey, they caught the breaks and they beat us' so you don't lose your confidence, but there is also a point of making corrections. They made some plays and Dallas did some good things, but we made too many bad pass plays with penalties, mental mistakes, and those will lose football games. So, we have to eliminate those, make corrections, be hard on ourselves, and fix those things.

Q: With the offensive line changes, how would you compare what was out there last night to what you usually have?
A: Our offensive line did a great job. You had some facemask penalty and a couple of things like that, but in pass protection, they did very well. They had a holding call a little late, which was dicey, but when you throw the ball 48 times and we didn't have sack. We had one intentional ground but that was really a coverage sack is what I'd call that. I thought they did a good job against a good pass rush scheme. Again, when you have 500 yards total offense that means you'll be doing good things up front and receivers are getting open. We had a lot of good things, but we have to fix up a few things.

Q: Did you ever think last night with all the injuries that you guys just need to get more bodies in here?
A: You can ask coach that. I'm so confident in the guys we have, and we have Will Beatty coming back and we have Mitch Petrus. We have seven or eight lineman dressed, so we have receivers on the practice squad, and we'll probably have to bring up a receiver this week to dress. You need probably about four dressed, so hopefully everybody stays healthy and we'll go from there.

Q: Can you attribute the lack of run game to the new people on the line?
A: Ask the coaches that. We weren't running particularly well, and we tried to establish the run and we had some success with it, but we didn't break many longs runs. We're okay with the run but didn't run probably as effective as we should've since they were playing a lot of two high-safeties.