NEW YORK GIANTS - OC KEVIN GILBRIDE - Ingles

(on Victor Cruz’s touchdown catch) “It was good. It was a hell of a play. It was ‘blitz zero’ but they pulled the linebacker out and they almost stole it and knocked it away. At least it obscured his vision. For him to concentrate and make the catch even though he bobbled it was tremendous.”

(on Mario Manningham’s long catch in the fourth quarter) “It was great concentration because it was over his shoulder and to be able to know that he had to keep his feet in, because it was right along the sidelines and because it was two-deep, he knew the safety, even though he was inside, had widened and was going to hit him. So not only did he have to catch the ball, keep his feet in bounds, he was going to have to hold onto the ball when he got hit. So it was a tremendous play by him.”

(on the play of New York’s offense) “I think we as an offense have been very, very successful. Certainly the triggerman’s got to do his job. I think collectively the receivers have really stepped up, made some tremendous plays. Mario did it tonight, but it’s been either Victor or Hakeem (Nicks). Somebody has made some big plays, so as a group, they expect to do well. They expect to put it in the end zone and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, when it’s probably the most difficult to pass pro, they rise up and pass protect better than they protected the whole game.”

(on if he anticipated that New England would let the Giants score at the end of the game) “I did not expect that. We were counting on just running the ball, milking it out and then it kind of caught us off guard. As it happened, we said, ‘Get down!’ and he thought he did. He thought he tapped down. We said, ‘We’ll be conservative, but if you can score a touchdown instead of a field goal running it in, let’s do it.’ So that’s what we figured. We’d use all three downs, milk all their timeouts. Milk as much of the clock as we can. If we get a touchdown, great. If we didn’t, then by the time we kicked a field goal it would be under 20 seconds and they’d have to go a long way to get that.”

(on being patient in the first half) “To me they played conservative the entire day. They were starting to lean, not every down, but they were leaning to Victor and Hakeem’s side. So even though they were two high, what we call ‘33 cloud,’ they were starting to slide that direction. We thought we would have a chance down the sideline. We thought we would have it with the formation we were just in a second ago when we had the three wides and the two backs. They dropped the safety down and made it look like single high and they tried to run it to two deep. That’s when we hit Mario down the right sideline where he just stepped out of bounds. We were hopeful we’d get a big play. We needed to get a big play because we had been moving it but not putting it in the end zone. So it was very important that somebody come up big and that was a huge catch he made.”

(on Eli Manning) “He’s been in that circle or cycle of success. He’s had confidence. He’s got a lot of confidence because he’s had so much success, but early on, the thing that always has distinguished him, been his hallmark, is he’s always going to come to work. He’s always going to put himself in position that he’s prepared. He’s going to put the players in the right position. He’s going to be able to make the protection adjustments that we ask him to make. We put a lot on his plate. He thrives on that. He looks forward to that challenge. He enjoys the intellectual part of it. I think the combination of just good genes, he’s been raised right, he has great poise and confidence, and the fact that we’ve had success as a team and I think the fact that he works as hard as he does, when that situation happens, he’s as prepared as can be.”

(on New England’s defense ) “I tip my hat to them. They had a sound approach: don’t let us get one-on-one matchups to see if we could get the big play. We’ve been very affective at that. See if we could prove that we could be disciplined enough to take these long, methodical drives and get in the end zone. Sure enough, we kept shooting ourselves in the foot, so their strategy was working. I looked up, we had 20 minutes time of possession but we didn’t have a lot of points.”