The Giants are hosting the Ravens on Sunday and their bid to move to 5-1 on the season isn’t the only storyline in play this week.
Giants defensive coordinator Wink Martindale was on the Ravens staff for the last 10 years and he spent the last four of those seasons as the coordinator in Baltimore. He left after last season in what the Ravens called a mutual decision, but one imagines that there’s a little extra juice to getting a win this week regardless of the exact circumstances of the breakup.
The Giants have four other former Ravens assistants on the coaching staff and safety Julian Love acknowledged that the connections will be a topic of discussion this week before saying the players have to focus on who will be on the other side of the ball.
“Yeah, I think it’s tough,” Love said. “We talk all the time about outside focus and inside focus. Him and all the other people who came from Baltimore — that’s an outside focus type of thing. Yeah, it’s there, it’s present and people will talk about it but at the end of the day, we’ve got to match up against who they have. It’s not really about Wink, it’s about us executing against their players.”
Martindale and the other assistants know many of the current Ravens well and we’ll find out on Sunday if that insight helps the Giants execute well enough to get another win.
