King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Media goal: Divide the New York Giants. Mission accomplished! Plus: NFL Week 13 picks.

Read more: Sports, Radio, Media, TV, Football, NFL, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

Dec. 1, 2006 | You'll never guess who's causing all the dissension and ugliness in the New York Giants locker room. It's the media!

This is really cool for me, because I never go to the big media meetings, but I happened to go to the one last month and I voted yes on the motion to disrupt the New York Giants locker room.

Here's how it went down. Michael Strahan, the star defensive end who'll be a media guy when his career's over, ripped into receiver Plaxico Burress in his regular spot on WFAN Radio Wednesday, saying, correctly, that Burress had quit on an overthrown pass late in the Giants' loss to Tennessee Sunday, their third straight defeat.

The pass was intercepted, leading to the winning score for the Titans. Strahan, who had missed the game with a foot injury, said that while Burress is a great player and a great guy, he intended to talk to the receiver about the incident.

In the locker room later that day, Burress, without defending his play, expressed relatively mild and thoroughly appropriate disappointment that Strahan would criticize him on the radio rather than face to face.

So ESPN reporter Kelly Naqi, standing near the back of a media scrum at Strahan's locker, asked him if it was true that he hadn't yet spoken to Burress. Reasonable question. In fact, one of only two must-ask questions for the scrum.

The other was "Why did you criticize your teammate on the radio?" Strahan might have had a good answer for that question, like that he felt that calling Burress out publicly was the best way to light a fire under him. Or he might have gotten all defensive, a hint that maybe he'd just popped off on the radio without thinking. Hmm.

Strahan, though he spoke calmly, launched into a tirade, demanding that Naqi come forward and ask this "negative" question to his face. "Look a man in the eye before you want to kill him or make up something," Strahan said.

He apparently missed the irony there.

The Giants spent Thursday jokingly singing the "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "We Are the World" in the locker room to display how unified they are as a team, despite the divisive media. I am not making this up.

Perhaps Strahan, who was practically born to be one of those interchangeable ex-players sitting at the pregame-halftime-postgame desk on one of the networks, will see the humor in the whole thing when he's part of the media, though it's doubtful he'll have to dirty himself in clusters around lockers.

Next page: Week 13 picks: The real story behind the fine for Michael Vick's obscene gesture