The Giants had Amendola sealed up on the final pass attempt of the game, only for Amendola to juke out a pair of defenders and create a few much-needed yards for Gostkowski. That move alone nearly doubled New England's win expectancy; Burke's model gives the Pats an 18.4 percent chance of winning with a 60-yard field goal attempt, but that figure jumps to 36.3 percent with Gostkowski merely having to hit a 54-yarder.

I don't think Coughlin (and Manning) mismanaged the situation all that badly, given the Giants' strengths and the breaks it took for the Patriots to get the victory. And while the Giants have blown several fourth-quarter leads this season, I'm also not sure why we're treating that as a sure fatal flaw. Coughlin has been conservative with late-game clock management for years now, and he has won two Super Bowls. The idea that a team needs to "learn how to win" late in games has always been nonsense, but that seems doubly naive with a veteran combination of coach and quarterback who have managed to succeed in years past. It's disappointing, but not worth a panic.

Given that it's incredibly important to score a touchdown and not just settle for a field goal, the Giants can't just settle for running the football. This isn't the Seahawks with Marshawn Lynch. The Giants are comfortably the worst short-yardage team this season, converting on 27 percent of their power-running attempts during the first half of the season. The second-worst team, Jacksonville, is at 38 percent. It's reasonable for the Giants to mix in one run play, but the significant value added by scoring a touchdown and the game situation mean the Giants can't just try and chew clock. They have to try and score.

And truthfully, it took a lot of breaks to go the Patriots' way over those final 126 seconds for this to even end up as a loss. What looked an awful lot like an Odell Beckham Jr. touchdown catch on first down was ruled incomplete. Even worse, the play somehow contrived to end before the two-minute warning, narrowly gifting the Patriots an extra timeout. Landon Collins dropped what would have been a game-sealing interception on the first play of the final Patriots drive. And then this happened: