Grant tells it like it is to Amukamara

Whenever a rookie struggles, it's usually up to a veteran player to lift his spirits and give him a pep talk. Deon Grant may have tried to do that with first-round pick Prince Amukamara, who was benched in the second half of Sunday's loss to the Redskins, but what he wound up giving him was a blunt assessment.

According to Grant, he told Amukamara that he's not ready for what he's being asked to do in the Giants' defense.

Grant said he pulled Amukamara into a hallway during halftime for a heart-to-heart after the cornerback was beaten for a touchdown and gave up two key first-down passes.

"I told him: 'This right here is bigger than you,' " Grant said Monday at a Citymeals-on-Wheels event in Brooklyn. "I told him, 'You have every physical attribute to play this game and go against any receiver.' I said: 'But right now, you're just not ready for that.' Not saying that he won't be ready, not taking anything from him, but me, being in the game for a minute . . . I've been seeing him struggle."

Grant noted that the rookie did not have the benefit of OTAs or minicamps because of the lockout, then spent most of the season trying to recover from a broken foot.

"It's natural," Grant said of the growing pains that are showing up on the field.

Tom Coughlin agreed.

"It's not any reflection on the young man other than the fact that he wasn't playing well at the time," he said of the decision to bench Amukamara. "Here's a guy, again, who's in big games without a lot of practice time. He's trying to do some things on the fly that he may not understand well enough or certainly in this case, didn't play well enough . . . These things all come with experience."

Grant did not play much against the Redskins -- a game-plan decision -- which afforded him a rare chance to watch the defense from the sideline. He said what he saw were players who were thinking too much and who weren't aggressive.

"We're trying to play it safe a little too much," he said. "We don't know how to transition . . . the coaching to, OK, now you have to go out there and be a football player. I think that's what we have backtracked into. When we go back into going out there, being physical, being aggressive, challenging the receiver, then we'll be successful."

That goes for Amukamara, too. Grant said he speaks with the rookie regularly, and he wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know Sunday.

"He's just a tough kid,'' Grant said, "so even though he might know in his mind that he might not be ready, he's not going to tell anybody that."