Osi Umenyiora: Why the Giants Didn’t Fear the Unbeaten Pats in Super Bowl XLII

Osi Umenyiora joined the show and walked Rich through the moment most football fans assumed was a coronation. The final regular-season game of the 2007 season was Patriots at Giants. New England finished 16-0. The Giants were playing for nothing. The seed was locked. Tom Coughlin still made them play to win.

Osi remembered the conversation in the locker room.

"Coughlin had told us, because we were thinking we weren't going to play, the first thing he said was, I know a lot of you are thinking that you're not going to play," Osi told Rich. "He was like, no, we play to win every game. We don't care what their record is, what our record is, we're going to play to try to beat them."

The Giants almost beat them. The Patriots won the game, but only after a competitive fight. Steve Spagnuolo's defensive game plan that night was deliberately basic. No exotic blitzes. No tip of the hand.

The walk off the field was the moment Osi pointed to.

"Me and Tuck were walking off the field after that game," Osi said. "And for whatever reason, I looked at him. I was like, you know, if we play these people again, we would beat them."

Justin Tuck agreed in the moment.

The logic Osi used to explain it was simple. The Giants had taken the game seriously, but not the game-planning. They had played their base. They had almost won anyway. If a rematch arrived in February, with Spagnuolo's full playbook available and the same team that nearly beat New England in Week 17, the math could flip.

The math did flip.

Rich asked about the helmet catch, the David Tyree moment that defined Super Bowl XLII and remains one of the most famous plays in NFL history. Osi's confession was funny.

"I didn't necessarily see it when it happened," he said. "All I saw was them grab Eli. So when they grabbed Eli, I put my head down."

A New England fan in the room, Rich noted, did the exact same thing in the exact same moment for opposite reasons.

"I didn't see it live," Osi said. "All I heard was the crowd erupt, and then I look up and I saw him getting up. I said, okay, something happened here. It was only when I got home that I actually saw what happened. It was mind-blowing."

Osi paid a small tribute to the offensive line for getting Eli out of the grasp. Eli, in past appearances on the show, has joked that there was holding on the play. Osi confirmed that Shaun O'Hara still hears about it.

The closer was about Osi's 6-sack game against the Eagles, which is still the Giants franchise record. Donovan McNabb was sacked 12 times total that day. Osi had half of them.

Osi attributed it to luck.

"I really do," he said. "I got to the quarterback that day, I think, seven times only. Six of the times I got there, it was a sack. And I've had games where I got to the quarterback like 12, 13 times and had zero sacks."

Rich asked what Coughlin said to him that night.

"Nothing," Osi said. "It was only Spags who came up to me and was like, I'm so happy for you. You know, you deserve this. You worked hard."

Coughlin said nothing. Osi laughed about it now.

The last detail was the trophies. Osi keeps his Super Bowl rings in a safe in London, where he currently lives. He never wears them. He took the idea from Deion Sanders.

"You never see an Olympic gold medalist walking around with their gold medal," Osi quoted Deion as saying.

He put the rings up. That was that.