Boley's grudge against Falcons is over

Michael Boley remembers the hollow feeling he had the only other time he was in a playoff game. He'd lost his starting job with the Falcons late in the season, knew his days with the organization were coming to an end, and spent most of the second half of Atlanta's wild-card loss to the Cardinals in January 2009 just standing there.

"I didn't play much at all," he recalled Wednesday. "The fourth quarter I was doing a lot of watching from the sideline."

Boley is back in the playoffs for the first time since that game, now as a Giants starter and facing his former team in Sunday's wild-card game. If he's watching from the sideline in this one, something will have either gone very wrong or very very right for the Giants. He's an instrumental piece in the Giants' defense -- Justin Tuck referred to him earlier this season as the player they could least afford to lose -- and he's finally coming back to form from a hamstring injury that slowed him for much of the last month.

That's a far different place than he was in when he left the Falcons.

"When you go from starting early on in my rookie year and being a starter for three-plus years and then having to take a step back, for anybody it's kind of disheartening," Boley said. "But after a while it's like, you know what, it's the business. I still have a job. You have to look at it like that . . . For all the hard work that I put in early on in my career, for them to basically tell you they're not going to try to re-sign you [when his contract expired], that says a lot."

Mike Smith was the coach of the Falcons then and part of the decision-making process to let Boley go.

"In terms of us building our roster, you have to make decisions based on the offensive and defensive sides of the football," Smith said Wednesday. "We made a decision . . . I have enjoyed watching Michael play. He is the same guy that we had down here. He is a very athletic three-down linebacker."

That apparently wasn't what Boley was hearing when he left Atlanta.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said of the reasons he was given for the Falcons' decision to move on. But he admitted that whatever was said drove him to play one of his best games in his first season with the Giants . . . against the Falcons.

"It was fresh in my mind then," Boley said of the 13-tackle, one-sack performance in the Giants' 34-31 overtime victory. "I made my point. My point was heard very well."

Boley insists that he no longer holds any grudges toward the Falcons, although he said roughly the same thing leading up to the 2009 game and admitted Wednesday that he was playing angry and motivated in that game. He could be hiding any ill will, bottling it up and saving it for Sunday's game as he did two seasons ago. But he gave a good reason for no longer harboring those feelings (besides, of course, the five-year, $25-million contract he signed with the Giants at the start of free agency that year).

"I'm in a better situation," he said. "Looking back, I can't even think of a place I'd rather be right now."