Everybody is eating on the defensive front.
The Giants racked up five sacks in Sunday's 20-17 victory over Miami, and they came from five different defenders. It wasn't the team's highest total of the season (the Giants had six against Seattle), but it was the first time that many players got the taste of a sack in a single game.
Among the quintet was Linval Joseph, whose second-quarter sack of Matt Moore for a seven-yard loss was the first of his young career.
The defensive tackle said he wasn't exactly gauging his career off the quarterback takedown, but he was anxious to see what all the fuss was about.
"A sack to me is like a tackle," said the 2010 second-round pick who was a backup as a rookie. "But it felt really good to get one because everybody else does."
The other four were Jason Pierre-Paul and Osi Umenyiora with one apiece, Mathias Kiwanuka with 1.5, while Justin Tuck wrapped up the other half-sack in his return from injury.
Joseph's sack was the only one of the first half as Moore continually escaped pressure. The Miami quarterback converted two third downs with his legs on scrambles of 19 and 11 yards before running a one-yard bootleg in for a touchdown that gave the Dolphins a 14-3 lead.
All that changed in the second half.
"We lost containment a little bit in the first half," Joseph said. "We came in here and fixed the little leaks and second half, we really had a chance to get after him."
Moore wouldn't rush for another yard after intermission, and the Giants sealed the game with consecutive sacks from Umenyiora and Kiwanuka, respectively, which led to Corey Webster's interception on Miami's final drive.
"I felt as though in the third quarter we sat down and said, 'Alright (Moore is) kind of killing us here so we have to do something about it,'" Tuck said. "We started doing a little bit more inside as far as letting our tackles kind of eat up the offense instead of putting them on the edges like we did in the first half."
"Obviously we would have liked to have that coming out in the beginning of the game," Kiwanuka said. "It was a good finish but we just have to start faster next time. It was just desire. Everybody wanted to win."
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