Written by Andy Furman | 25 August 2008

Unless your name is Brian Mitchell, you ARE going to get injured returning kickoffs/punts and subsequently have your career shortened. So it is just a matter of time for Bradshaw before he gets hurt doing this. Does the emperor have no clothes? Could it be that ALL (100%) of us are stupid and wrong and the Giants coaches are the geniuses who understand Bradshaw is #3 on the depth chart and needs to be doing specials?! In situations like these I GENERALLY defer to the coaches because they obvly have more information than we do. In this case, I felt like this in midseason '07 and stopped wondering (because of the fumbles). After all, he was a rookie. But then Ward gets hurt, and Jacobs gets hurt in Buffalo. And Eli cannot throw the ball in H2. So they give the ball to Bradshaw almost every play and the Bills still can't stop him. And then we see him 30% more productive than Jacobs in 20% less carries. (Whatever the #s, I rounded them up a lot because of plays like when Snee was called for holding vs GB etc..)

Now this.

One of the reasons this blog got started was because these rants would go to ~15 giants fans on email and it made sense to 'air' it out. The Fassel Prevent offense was the beginnings of this Emperor-has-no-clothes football blog. I like to tell the story of how Wellington Mara thought losing a 24 point lead to SF in Jan '03 felt like Chicago Jan '86. To me it felt like Minnesota Jan'98 multiplied X 10, easily the biggest loss for me as a fan in all my years of watching sports. I tell the story because I knew Mara's light at the end of the tunnel was a Mack truck headed right toward us. The Emperor INDEED had no clothes, and it just took Dallas W3 and Westbrook's punt return in midseason to open everyone else's eyes the following season.

So now the emperor has no clothes again. We wonder how an all pro TE can get 2 catches per game. We wonder how Bradshaw can be third string. I hear everyone when I am alerted to the fact that Jacobs pounding the defense sets up Bradshaw. Am I missing something when I see Bradshaw pull in nice grabs from out of the backfield or set up Tyree's TD in Q4 vs the Patriots with a nice 8 yard catch and run in the red zone? This guy does it very well and yet we see him mostly on specials. As down as I am about Osi being gone for the season, moving Kiwi back to DL where he belongs combined with having Bradshaw start RB would change my opinion of this team's chances.

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