Super Bowl 2012: Ranking the New York Giants' Top MVP Candidates

With the Super Bowl less than a week away, the teams already touched down in Indianapolis and with the torture of media day now behind them, talk will deviate toward the X’s and O’s of the matchup.

Who is going to cover the New England Patriots two tight ends? How will their inept secondary shut down three excellent Giants receivers? Will the Giants be able to get to Brady with just four rushers? And so on for what seems like endless hours of nonsensical and often hypocritical banter by men deemed “experts.”

As I sit here and watch Eric Mangini sketch out diagrams and routes about how the Giants can stop the Patriots two back packages with a tight end in the slot, I can’t help but think: “Hey buddy, if you know this so well then why ain’t you coaching?”

So here is my prediction: Giants 50 – Patriots 7

Pretty bold huh? Yea, it probably won’t happen, but at least I am not trying to justify it with absurd tactical analysis that I have no clue about because I am not on either of those teams!

So there you have it, the New York Giants are your 2012 Super Bowl champs! Now let’s have some fun and make some predictions about what really matters—individual accomplishments.

Here are the top five MVP candidates for the 2012 Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

Warning: If you are at all superstitious, this article is a bit forward thinking and falls under the definition of a jinx. I recommend you do not read further than this page.

5. Victor Cruz

If you are reading this article you are probably a Giants fan or at the very least a football watcher, and if you are either of these then you are well aware of Victor “salsa dancing” Cruz.

I’m not going to bore you with stats and figures (82 receptions, 1,536 yards and nine touchdowns in 19 regular season games) that have been rammed down your throat since he caught the 99 yarder against the Jets in week 16. All you really need to know about the undrafted second year receiver out of UMASS is that he is lightening-fast and has been next to impossible to stop for a full 60 minutes.

I hate terms like “game changer” or “X-factor,” but it’s hard to describe what he brings to the game without using a variation of these overly broad terms. While he has developed into a decent route runner and has OK hands he is not quite Jerry Rice, but he does mimic the legendary player in one regard—he can make something out of nothing.

The slippery New Jersey native consistently breaks tackles and gets away from defensive backs with his quick feet and ability to out run what seems like anyone in the league. This does not bode well for a Patriots team whose defense has given up big yards in the air.

Belichick can scheme and plan all he wants, but he can’t make his corners better tacklers and certainly not faster in a week. When you are playing Cruz that is really all it takes to stop him.

He feeds off of his matchup’s mistakes and then turns what should be a six-yard gain for even the best receivers in the league to game changing big plays.

Cruz is just as likely to go the entire game with no catches or a handful for 30 yards as he is plus a hundred and two scores. It really all hinges on the Pats defense. But should the latter happen, you can expect him to be salsa dancin’ up on stage with the Lombardi trophy in one hand and the MVP in the other.

4. Osi Umenyiora

No good coach is ever going to shy away from poor results under the guise of injury, especially a hardliner like Tom Coughlin. However, the coach who has made a name for himself living on the hot-seat was probably well within his right to this year.

Going into the season the Giants’ defense was riddled with injuries, making the secondary seemingly unknown to even the most devout of fans. Up on the front line there was also a major hole, a 6’3” 255-pound one to be exact.

Umenyiora was forced to miss the first three games of the year after undergoing arthroscopic surgery in the preseason. Even when he returned in October anyone who knew what he was capable of could tell you he was not 100 percent.

But as the year has progressed, he has gotten better and better and eventually finished second on the team with nine sacks and forced two fumbles. Not mind-blowing numbers by any means, but when you figure he has five and a half sacks in his last five games, two of them against Jesus reincarnate himself, Aaron Rodgers, you have to figure he has finally found his groove.

It is no mystery to any keen observer of the game that if you let Brady sit and have time he will kill you, so the pass rush will surely be on display in Indy. Brady has been sacked 32 times this season. Only in his first full season as a starter was he taken down more (41). He also has more fumbles (six) than he has had in four of his last five complete seasons.

Things are just fitting perfectly together at the right time for Osi and with a game plan that is as simple as “GET TO BRAD,” you know he can’t wait to dig his toes into the turf and fly around that edge.

3. Ahmad Bradshaw/Brandon Jacobs

For all the fantasy fanatics out there, you may be looking at this pick and scratching your head, but if you can get your mind out of that artificial stat intensive way of looking at the game perhaps you could be persuaded to see my point of view.

The Giants ranked dead last this year in rushing yards this year, so naturally everyone assumes they have a poor running game and few are going to put Bradshaw or Jacobs up for any kind of elitism at the position.

And if you are one of these people, you are entitled to your opinion, but you are also a blind doufus that forgets one very important thing about football—you don’t win by eating up yards, you win by scoring touchdowns!

How do the Giants fare in rushing touchdowns you ask? Well 17 on the season and sixth best overall seems respectable to me.

I have never understood why we judge defenses, offenses, running backs and quarterbacks on yards. It is a meaningless piece of information that dimwits like Meril Hodge use to back up their “panic meters” and other egotistical prophecies. All that matters is how many times you put the ball into the end zone, and the two backs for the Giants have done a great job at that all year.

It was too hard for me to try and make a case for one over the other. It is easier to attempt to foretell which TE Belichick will go to more. Bradshaw could very easily have a career day, carrying for 15 times and gaining 120 yards while Jacobs gets four carries for 20 yards, but three touchdowns. Kind of hard to split hairs on who is more deserving of the MVP.

In the end I think one of the two has a good chance to control the game. The Pats defense has not been very good this year according to the same stats that said the Giants rushers weren’t either. But here both are in the Super Bowl mostly because the New England defense has had a bend, but don’t break mentality all season.

It could come down to Bradshaw and Jacobs’s ability to simply punch the ball into end zone. Look at the Ravens last week. Baltimore had more yards than the New England, but were only one for four in the red zone. The Pats kept them from getting six points and won the game.

Add in the fact that cautious Coughlin will feel much more comfortable with Brady on the sideline and it is reasonable to think this could be a running day for the Gmen.

2. Jason Pierre-Paul

I am not exactly a Giants fan, but I live in New York and am surrounded by them so naturally I started to tune in and watch. It is not always enjoyable, especially as they go through their traditional string of midseason losses, but in the end it beats watching the fat rat and his gang-green run their yaps to a .500 record.

However, this year was different. This year it was fun. And for me it all had to do with watching one player—Jason Pierre-Paul.

Beast, animal, superhuman, freak, whatever you slightly insulting adjective you want to use to describe him it would probably be accurate. He is quicker than guards and stronger than tackles. He is the NFL’s equivalent of Lebron James: the total athlete that is a matchup nightmare for any offensive coordinator.

Leading the team with 16.5 sacks on the season, he took over and made the defensive line his own as Justin Tuck and Umenyiora were out earlier in the season. Their return only improved Pierre-Paul’s play as he was able to get in more one on one blocking situations.

While he has not been at his best in the sack department this postseason, he did have six in the last four games of the regular season and blocked a game winning field goal try by the Dallas Cowboys, which proved critical in them even getting into the playoffs.

So now he faces the Patriots in the biggest game of his life. Most of the time, if you give two weeks to Bill Belichick to prepare for anything the hooded genius will come out on top. But in the case of Pierre-Paul it is difficult to scheme against pure ability.

And who knows, with Bill getting tricky on gadget plays and interesting tight end formations, you could even see Pierre-Paul occasionally drop back into coverage. At the very least he should be responsible for giving Gronk and Hernandez a bump at the line to get them off their routes.

Pierre-Paul is No. 2 on this list for the simple fact that he can do so many things: get sacks, block kicks, chase down running backs and create havoc on the offensive line. Let’s not forget that while the MVP is given to the player that shines the most, that shine has more to do with big plays than a consistent performance. Pierre-Paul can make that big play, or two, or three, or four, or…well you get the point.

1. Eli Manning

Did you expect anything else?

I don’t need to go through it all about how Eli is playing in his brother’s house, how he can go up a ring on Peyton, how he can put himself amongst the elite, how he suddenly enters the talk of being a hall of famer, yada yada yada.

We have all heard this nonsense before and personally I am sick of it. I would rather just let him play the game and then talk about what it means after. Makes logical sense to me.

But in the end this game is really going to come down to one thing: can Eli beat Brady, again? Whether we like it or not, that is the question and will ultimately be what determines this year’s Super Bowl MVP.

The media has already declared this the year of the quarterback and while I am not a full-fledged believer that everything an offense does hinges on the play of the quarterback, for these two teams it really does.

So while Hicks and Cruz have gotten hundreds of yards after the catch and the offensive line has kept Manning’s back pretty clean this season, all the credit goes to No. 10. It is one of the perks of the position.

It is really Manning’s honor to lose. If Eli is able to out-throw the golden boy in a 30-plus point shootout then he will deserve to tie him for number of Super Bowl MVP’s. If it is a slugfest where the talented Giants defense terrorizes Brady all day to win, the award will still go to Eli. The only way he will not get it is if the Giants lose or win and someone has a record setting performance.

It’s a quarterbacks league, for better or worse.

Who Do You Think Will Be the MVP?

I don’t claim to be a fortune teller (even though I am a distant relative of Nostradamus), but I figure if those baboons on TV can try and get inside steel trap heads of Coughlin and Belichick, why can’t I make my own asinine predictions about what the Super Bowl will bring?

There are plenty of names I left off this list: Justin Tuck could come up with some huge plays on the line. Antrele Rolle will surely figure heavily against the Pats’ tight ends. Hakeem Nicks has been nothing short of superb this postseason. And Mario Manningham could be this year’s David Tyree.

So with a majority reading this article being Giants fans and already assured of a repeat of 2008, the only thing left to debate is the MVP. Let me know who you think will be going home slightly happier than the rest of the team.