Antrel Rolle just played his first regular-season road game with the New York Giants, and he doesn’t think much of the way the team structured the players’ travel schedules.
Rolle said in an interview on WFAN that he thought the Giants took the players to Indianapolis too early in the day on Saturday, and that the Giants arrived at the stadium to play the Colts too early in the day on Sunday. Rolle said a lot of sitting around sapped the team’s energy.
“No one was enthused, there was no excitement, there was no swagger out there on the field, which actually drove me crazy,” Rolle said, per the New York Daily News.
Rolle said the Giants got to the stadium more than three hours before kickoff and were “just sitting around, being lackadaisical.” He said that when he played for the Cardinals they’d usually arrive at a road stadium about two hours before a game.
“Things have to change,” Rolle said. “If you want a winning team. If you want a team that has a competitive attitude and to have that dog mentality sometimes you have to let that team be a dog. Everything can’t be controlled. And right now everything is controlled within this organization. Everything is controlled.”
It’s not exactly a news flash that Giants coach Tom Coughlin likes for everything to be controlled, so Coughlin might take Rolle’s statement that “everything is controlled” as a positive sign. But Coughlin also wants his players to use their time productively, and Rolle seems to think the Giants had a counterproductive 24 hours leading up to the game.
“I just felt like we had too much down time, doing nothing,” Rolle said. “Honestly I really felt that it carried over to the game. Of course you’re supposed to relax before the game. But we got to Indy at 3 o’clock Saturday, so we had that entire day of doing nothing. Then we had the next day of sitting around, not doing too much.”
Rolle wasn’t necessarily saying a different travel itinerary would have made a difference in a game the Giants lost 38-14, however.
“We got our butts whooped,” Rolle said. “There’s no other way to put it.”