There’s an unwritten rule in sports stating that when your team loses a big game and you’re the star, you’re supposed to stand up at the press conference when it’s all over and lie – you know, put all the blame on yourself and praise your coaches. Tiki Barber broke that rule after the Giants’ horrendous 23-0 playoff loss to the Carolina Panthers on Sunday, and now he’s paying the price.

Let’s start with what Barber said: “[Panthers head coach John] Fox is a great defensive coordinator,and they had a great scheme and a great plan for us and we couldn’t adjust to it.”And: “I just think they had a good scheme. I think in some ways we were outcoached.They had more intensity than we did.” And: “It was obvious they knew what we were doing, and we didn’t adjust.”And: “It was strange – it was as if they were in our huddle.They kind of had us dissected and figured out before the play.”

Now, there are two ways to react to Barber’s comments.The first is to examine what he said in light of what happened Sunday and what it indicates about the Giants’ obvious weaknesses.Or,you can simply kill the messenger.Unfortunately, the coach-worshipping local sports press has chosen to do the latter.They should reconsider.Barber is not given to loose talk and irresponsible accusations. This the player who, just a week before, many were rightfully hailing as the true leader of this team and possibly the league’s real MVP.

The Barber backlash was summed up by Mike Lupica in the Daily News yesterday: “[Barber] can put whatever spin he wants to on all this today. Barber still looked cheap yesterday as he repeatedly went out of his way to point a finger at the Giants’ game plan … If you think coaching was the headline here, you were watching the wrong game.”

Apparently, the game Lupica and most of the area’s football writers were watching was one in which the Giants players were supposed to ignore the bad strategy and bad tactics that constantly left them at a disadvantage against a team that was no better than they were – unless you think Carolina’s DeShaun Foster suddenly metamorphosed into a better running back than Barber.

I don’t. I think it had to do with the Panthers’ decision to take one and sometimes both safeties off the Jeremy Shockey watch – the tight end’s gimpiness left him slow enough to be covered by a linebacker – and key them on Barber. I also think it had much to do with the coaches’ baffling failure to exploit the Panthers’ defensive set with something besides a handoff to Barber – or perhaps Lupica thinks that Barber and the rest of the offense should have ignored their coaches and called their own plays?

That might not have been a bad idea.Though it seems a dim memory now, midway through the season the Giants boasted the NFC’s most potent offense.On November 6 the Giants were averaging 29.1 points per game, tops in the conference, but at a point when you might have expected their offense to kick into high gear,it began to slump.Over the last eight games,they averaged just 23.6 points a game and hit 30 just once,in the season finale against the lowly Oakland Raiders.

Not coincidentally, the second half drop-off was precisely the point at which Eli Manning’s game started to go south. Football pundits are always telling us “The run sets up the pass” or some such nonsense, but the record almost never bears this out. In the second half of the season, Barber tore up the league, but every week, no matter how many yards he gained, it seemed the Giants’ passing game became more ineffective. In the first eight games, Manning averaged a healthy seven yards a toss; over the last eight just 6.4. No team can slide like this and expect to enter the playoffs on an upswing.

What happened? It’s hard to say exactly. As the season wore on, opposing defenders were constantly settling around Giants receivers as the ball arrived – rather, like Barber said, as if they had been in the Giants’ huddle. The last five games were particularly dreadful.Through the first eleven games, Manning had thrown 20 touchdowns against only 10 interceptions, but for the rest of the season he had only four touchdowns against 10 interceptions. Much of the blame, of course, must fall on the quarterback, but Manning wasn’t calling the plays, and he certainly didn’t design the game plans.

Bill Walsh once told me,”The first half of the season shows how much offensive talent a team has. The second half shows you how well the coaching staff knows what to do with it.”

After eight games, Walsh explained, defensive coordinators have accumulated enough game films to nail a team’s offensive tendencies; if the offensive brain trust doesn’t have the wit and improvisational ability to keep adjusting and creating new opportunities,then one by one, smart defensive teams will strip them of their weapons until the offense bogs down altogether. That’s what happened to the Giants in their nextto-the-last game, against Washington. Eight weeks earlier, on October 30, the Giants embarrassed the Redskins 36-0. But on December 24, in their biggest regular season game of the year, it was the Giants who were humiliated by the same Redskins team, which stuffed the interior line with their safeties and jammed the Giants receivers at the line – precisely the tactics the Panthers would use two weeks later.

The Giants have a lot of problems that need to be addressed before next season. They desperately need another wideout who can take heat off Plaxico Burress.They need more depth at linebacker, and, more than anything else, they need one and perhaps two aces in the secondary, the team’s weakest spot and a catastrophe that was waiting to happen the entire season. But most of all, they need coaches who can think, motivate, and adjust.They need coaches who listen when Tiki Barber talks.

Mr. Barra is the author, most recently, of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”