Rich Has a Special Request for the NY Giants & OBJ During Their SNF Matchup vs the Cowboys

Cut day is not a fun day, and it has gotten worse. It used to be a slow march, 90 to 75 and onward. Now roughly 30 players go at once, and everyone scrambles for a practice squad spot or, these days, a job at LSU.

But one name landed on a roster, and Rich could not be happier about it.

Odell Beckham Jr. is a New York Giant again.

"Think about it, man," Rich said. This is the guy who arrived from LSU into a house on fire, was hurt to start his rookie season, and then simply went nuts. He took over the team and then took over the town, and became as dynamic a young football player as the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area has seen.

Rich was careful to make the important point twice, because it is the part that matters.

Beckham earned this.

John Harbaugh is about the team and the franchise, not about selling number three jerseys. The Giants need dynamic pass catchers, particularly with Calvin Austin down for the season, and they do not need a reclamation project for the sake of nostalgia.

That distinction is the whole thing. This is not a farewell tour. It is a roster spot.

Which brings Rich to his request, and he has thought about it in some detail.

The Giants open the season on Sunday Night Football at MetLife against the Dallas Cowboys. Rich would like the play run again.

Not a version of it. It.

"If I'm John Harbaugh, I have this play in my playbook," he said. And he is not calling it early. He is saving it for the proper end zone and the proper corner, and running it the moment the Giants get anywhere near midfield.

He would also spend the week preparing Jackson Dart specifically, which required establishing how much history the quarterback would actually remember.

The catch was 2014, Beckham's rookie year. Dart would have been nine.

"When you were a nine-year-old, Jackson, Eli Manning once upon a time threw a ball in the air and Odell snagged it with one hand, and Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth lost their minds on NBC."

Rich's full production is more ambitious than one play call. He wants Eli Manning out there as an honorary captain, which is convenient, because the Giants have already named him one.

Get Manning, Dart and Beckham on that field together. Take some pictures. Then run it.

"Why the hell not?"

The symmetry of the day was not lost on him. The show opened discussing a 35-year-old coming off the couch after two years away, and here is the Giants' first-round pick from the 2014 draft making the roster at 33.

It is also a real season for this franchise. They went outside the family for Harbaugh and handed him the assignment directly: remake it, in your image.

The desk raised the obvious objection, which is that the Giants lost that famous game.

Rich was untroubled, because that is not how all-time plays work.

Everybody remembers the ball going through Buckner's legs in the '86 World Series and forgets there was a Game 7 after a rainout, two days later. Everybody thinks the United States beating the Soviets in 1980 was the end of it.

"Everybody thinks Aaron Donald sacking Joe Burrow was the end of his career," he added. "No, he played two more years after."

The result, obviously, should be different this time.