Coughlin Sends Message With Burress Suspension

The Giants sent a strong message to Plaxico Burress yesterday, suspending their star wide receiver for two weeks after he missed work on Monday and Tuesday and didn’t return phone calls from team officials.Burress will be banished from the team’s facility until October 6, the day after the Giants host the Seattle Seahawks. This week is the Giants’ bye, so the two-week suspension will force Burress to miss only one game.Giants coach Tom Coughlin has often clashed with Burress, for reasons ranging from Burress declining to participate in voluntary offseason workouts to Burress making a brash prediction about the Giants winning in the days leading up to the Super Bowl. But when Burress and the Giants agreed to a five-year, $35 million contract extension on the day of the regular-season opener against the Washington Redskins, everyone thought that meant the team and the player were on the same page and ready to work together for the long haul.Those positive feelings lasted all of three weeks. Yesterday Coughlin made clear that no player — no matter how talented — is above the rules of the team, and that an unexcused absence was the last straw.“We’ve had success here because of the team concept,” Coughlin said yesterday. “And the team concept means, basically, that everyone is accountable and responsible, and that we don’t let the other guys down.”But while Burress wasn’t always the kind of player Coughlin wanted him to be in practice, Burress is the kind of player every NFL coach wants to have on Sundays. He’s a big, strong, fast receiver who fights for the ball in coverage and plays hard at game time. In fact, regardless of his practice habits, Burress is dedicated enough that he started all 16 games and led the team in catches, receiving yards, and touchdowns last season, despite hobbling through the year on an injured ankle. The game against the Seahawks will be just the second game he has missed in four seasons with the Giants.Drew Rosenhaus, Burress’s agent, acknowledged yesterday that Burress had violated team rules with an unexcused absence. But Rosenhaus said Buress was attending to family matters and that the Giants overreacted with the suspension. Rosenhaus said he and the NFL players’ union are working together on filing a grievance, and that they hope to go before an arbiter to get him reinstated before the game against the Seahawks. But players rarely succeed in challenging team suspensions.Burress has a base salary of $2 million this year, or $117,648 a week for the 17 weeks of the season, and under the league’s collective-bargaining agreement with the players’ union, the Giants have the right to dock Burress two weeks’ pay. So Burress will likely lose almost a quarter of a million dollars, and it could be more than that: The team could also ask an arbiter to order Burress to pay back a portion of his signing bonus and roster bonus, although teams sometimes choose not to pursue those measures. The Giants have not said whether they will.Burress is the Giants’ leading receiver through three games of the season, with 18 catches for 259 yards. But while Burress will be missed on the field, his absence might not hurt the Giants as much as those numbers would suggest. Burress makes a lot of big plays, but he also drops too many passes, and Eli Manning tends to force the ball to Burress. In Steve Smith, Domenik Hixon, and Sinorice Moss, the Giants have three young and talented wide receivers who haven’t yet developed much of a rapport with Manning, and two weeks of practice and one game without Burress on the field might help build that rapport, and help remind Manning that he doesn’t always have to look to Burress first.And it should help the entire team to see that Coughlin won’t allow them to rest on the laurels of their status as defending champions and will instead be just as demanding as ever. Last September, when the Giants lost their first two games and Coughlin was widely viewed as a disciplinarian who couldn’t deal with today’s players, a suspension of a star player like Burress would have been viewed as another sign that Coughlin wasn’t up to the task. But now that Coughlin has a Super Bowl ring on his finger, it’s hard to dispute that his methods get results.The bottom line is that the suspension is the type of move that will be judged favorably in hindsight if Burress returns to the Giants in two weeks and leads them to another great year, and judged harshly if Burress tanks and the Giants’ passing game struggles. But on the first day, it looks like the right move, and a move that reminds everyone that the Giants are Tom Coughlin’s team.Mr. Smith is a writer for Fanhouse.com.

Coughlin Sends Message With Burress Suspension

Coughlin Sends Message With Burress Suspension

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