One of pro football’s most intriguing and ultimately fruitless arguments is whether drawing more penalties makes for a bad team or whether bad teams draw more penalties because they are bad teams. I think there is more evidence for the first proposition, as the teams with the worst won-lost records every year tend to be the leaders in penalties. However, there are some spectacular exceptions, the most obvious being the New York Giants under Tom Coughlin.

With their 19–3 win over Washington yesterday, the Giants have now won 13 of their last 20 regular season games, and over that span they have incurred more penalties than any team in the National Football League. Against the Redskins, they drew 20 flags, leaving yet another set of weary officials contemplating rotator cuff surgery. Sixteen were assessed, including four for the dreaded false starts, which have become so common an infliction for Coughlin’s Giants that he should consider putting backup lights on his offensive linemen’s back sides.

But they got away with it, in large part because they have tremendous talent, particularly at quarterback, running back, and both wideout and tight end. This last Sunday, at least, they had a very good defense, too, allowing a ridiculously low net of 164 yards. They sacked Washington quarterback Mark Brunell three times, knocked him down five others, and held the Skins star running back Clinton Portis to just two runs longer than six yards and just 76 total yards on the day. Brunell was simply awful, in large part because defensive end Osi Umenyiora, rushing from the right side of the Giants line, kept forcing him back against the grain every time he dropped back and began to roll to his left.

I don’t know why left-handed passers should have more trouble rolling to their right than right-handers do rolling to their left, but they do — most of them anyway, even the good ones like Ken Stabler and Steve Young. The best counter for a left-hander who is picking you apart is a great pass rusher coming in from the right end of your line, and that’s what the Giants had Sunday.With Michael Strahan re-emerging as a force from the other end, Brunell generally looked like a pinball getting batted from one side to another.

Washington coach Joe Gibbs has won so many games with so many different quarterbacks over the years — three Super Bowls with three different passers — that he seems to have developed an arrogance about his own ability to win with whomever he has as quarterback.It’s almost as if Gibbs thinks he can will Brunell into being a great passer, and the fact that Brunell has enjoyed a few successes — last season, at age 35, he did manage 23 TD passes against only 10 interceptions — has blinded Gibbs to his obvious deficiencies such as decreasing mobility and slow release.

At any rate, the Giants’ defense ate Brunell alive while Eli Manning played his most efficient, if unspectacular, game of the year, spreading around 23 completions to seven receivers with no interceptions. Running against a Redskins defense that played all day with its ears back — the loss of their best defensive back, Shawn Springs, apparently left the Skins feeling as if they needed more help on the coverage than on the pass rush — Tiki Barber enjoyed his best day, carrying 23 times for an average of 5.2 yards a try, the first time this year he has cracked 5.0.

The Giants were never really pressed, and Washington seemed curiously unmotivated, offering New York a welcome chance to recover from the horror of their 42–30 loss to Seattle two weeks ago.They seemed relaxed yet focused through the entire game, which makes those 16 penalties even more inexplicable. It’s obvious by now that the Redskins are not a good team, so the Giants could get away with all those flags. Next week they play in Atlanta against the Falcons, who are a good team.

***

A BIG GREEN MESS

Looking through the stats of the Jets’ 41-0 disaster at Jacksonville, I felt like Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugitive” when he arrives at the train wreck: “My, my, my. What a mess.” There was, though, a bright spot, at least if you believe that the most important purpose for a football team is not to win a game but to simply succeed in implementing its game plan.

All week long Eric Mangini kept insisting that the Jets had made great progress in establishing the run in last week’s three-point loss to the Colts. And in truth, they did. Mangini told anyone who would listen that the key to beating Jacksonville would be the Jets running game — a strong indication of exactly how even a smart coach can talk himself into something very foolish. Leon Washington ripped the Jags for 101 yards on 23 carries, easily the best performance by a Jets runner this year — in fact, the only good performance by a Jets runner this year. His team had only one serious scoring threat all day and muffed that.

It’s distressing that Mangini, who seemed to be making real progress before this debacle, doesn’t seem to understand that his primary weapon is Chad Pennington, who was allowed to throw the ball on first down only twice on the Jets’ first four possessions, by which time the score was already 28–0 and the game was essentially over. Marty Lyons, the Jets’ excellent radio color man, kept pointing out the importance of unleashing Pennington in the first quarter and getting out to an early lead. Instead, the Jets spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to play ball control, putting themselves in third and long situations where they had no choice but to pass. The Jets’ offensive wall is smallish by NFL standards, not built to withstand such brutal pounding; they allowed six sacks on Pennington, who, after an excellent four-game start, had the worst game of his professional career, gaining 71 yards and throwing three interceptions.

The most embarrassing aspect of the loss was that it came to a team that was no better than the Jets. Through their first four games, the Jaguars had outscored their opponents by three points, while the Jets had outscored theirs by five. This should have been a fight between equals, but the Jets were behind by two touchdowns in the first quarter faster than you can say “Come back Herman Edwards, all is forgiven.” The spin I’m already hearing is that such a humiliation should serve to motivate the Jets for next week’s game with Miami at the Meadowlands. But even if they win next week, what does it say about a team that has to lose by 41 points before it gets motivated?

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