Bomar gets opportunity to win Giants' backup QB job

It's always a strange situation for a backup quarterback in the final preseason game. It's his chance to shine, to show that the team can function under his leadership. And then, if all goes according to plan, he disappears for the next four or five months of Sundays.

Ideally the Giants won't need a backup for Eli Manning. As they visualize the upcoming season, he'll be the one under center for every important snap. Maybe a backup will get to come in and mop up in the fourth quarter of some laughers. That's the way it's imagined, at least.

Still, there needs to be some confidence that should Manning have to come out of a game due to an injury or - gasp! - miss a few weeks during the season, the backup can handle the job. The Giants thought they had the man for that role in Jim Sorgi, who had been a backup in the NFL for six seasons. But yesterday they put Sorgi and his injured shoulder on injured reserve, ending his first season with the Giants before it even began.

That leaves the Giants with Rhett Bomar, a player who has never taken a regular-season snap, as the backup. Tom Coughlin said the Giants are investigating their options in terms of bringing in a veteran, weighing availability and cost. But perhaps the element that the Giants will consider the most is Bomar himself and how he plays tomorrow night against the Patriots.

"Depending on if he goes in there and plays well Thursday night, we'll certainly have good evidence to think that he can do it," Coughlin said.

Bomar said that hasn't been expressed to him, the idea that he is playing to satisfy the Giants' curiosity about how much they can trust him. But he is.

"I'm not stupid," he said. "I know what the deal is."

That deal: Play well and you can be the No. 2 quarterback. Don't play well and someone with more experience could be here by Monday.

Bomar is confident he'll be able to secure the job, especially after a summer in which he has risen from afterthought on the quarterback depth chart to the de facto starter the week leading up to and including the second preseason game.

"I never thought I'd get a whole week of practice, a whole game in the preseason," he said. "I didn't think that would happen this year. But I'm glad it did. I feel a lot more comfortable now."

Even Manning has noticed that.

"He doesn't have a whole lot of playing experience, just some preseason, but you've seen him these last few weeks even get a lot more reps and get more comfortable with everything going on," Manning said.

Bomar spent last year on the Giants' practice squad, which isn't a really good place to develop as a quarterback. He was mostly playing safety and receiver on scout teams, not throwing footballs or running the offense. He also knows that in the last two years the Giants have kept just two quarterbacks on their 53-man roster, so if he winds up as the No. 3 guy he could be back on the practice squad. That's why even after the Giants signed Sorgi in the offseason, Bomar kept his sights on the backup job.

"I was never coming in saying 'I'll settle for the third spot, whatever,' " he said. "I wanted to come in and every rep I had, improve and get better. I wanted to be the No. 2 after David [Carr] left and I've been working hard to do that."

He'll have one more day of hard work to get that job. And if he does, then the Giants hope he can relax for the rest of the season.