Perry Fewell resists the 'simple' explanation

One of the things we heard over and over again during the Giants’ Super Bowl run was that the team made the defense simpler and they responded with a six-game winning streak and a championship.

Quietly, along that run, Perry Fewell was resisting that notion of simplicity. His message may have simplified – do what I tell you and we’ll win – but his schemes, he noted, did not. Yesterday he again bristled at the idea that he somehow dumbed down the defense and that led to the Super Bowl win.

“Do you think I simplified things last year, guys?” Fewell asked the media in Albany. “That was good for you guys to hear, but you know what? We got more complicated more than we simplified. I think what we did was we listened and heard each other and I simplified a few things from a call standpoint. As we entered the playoffs, we became more complex.”

“The players allowed me to do it because they all bought in,” Fewell added. “While we might have gone into the game plan, I’ll use a random term, a number, of saying four pressures … we may have increased that to eight pressures in a ballgame (in the playoffs). We doubled our pressures, we kind of doubled our coverages, we added more to their plate. That is what I mean by more complex. They had more to think about and we packaged it in a way that was good learning and good teaching for them and they were able to handle that.”

So basically have everybody “all in.” Have guys like Antrel Rolle and Kenny Phillips willing to play their part, even if it’s not the part they wanted to play. Sounds simple.

“It is simple, but it is not easy,” Fewell said. “Yes, it is that simple but it is not easy to do. You have 11 guys and you have to get those guys playing together. And we all have to be on the same page and we all have to believe in the same things. But what we were able to accomplish in the last six games is a testament to them. When we all think alike, we can do some good things.”