Giants’ road acclaim gets tested

Cleveland is playing host to its first Monday night game since the 2003 season.

CLEVELAND (AP) — These out-of-town guests are smug, rude and inconsiderate. New Yorkers who hang out in New Jersey, they treat every place they visit like they own it.

Home wreckers.

With 11 straight wins, 12 if you count last season’s Super Bowl victory, the New York Giants are the unofficial kings of the road in the NFL.

On Monday night, they’ll try to extend the second-longest road winning streak in league history as they face the Cleveland Browns (1-3), who have dropped their first two homes games in 2008 and can hardly afford to lose another if they have any intention of turning around a season that’s slipping away.

Since losing their ’07 season opener at Dallas, the Giants (4-0) have been perfect every time they’ve traveled to games outside East Rutherford, N.J.

They entered last year’s playoffs as a wild card and proceeded to reel off wins at Tampa Bay, in Dallas and on the frozen tundra of Green Bay’s Lambeau Field before pulling off their epic upset of New England in the Super Bowl at Glendale, Ariz.

Road rage indeed.

Giants coach Tom Coughlin doesn’t have any expansive theories on his team’s string of road success. To Coughlin, it’s simply a matter of playing as one.

“I think it’s the team, I really do,” he said. “It’s the team, the belief in each other. There’s been many times we’ve been down. We were down 14-0 in Buffalo and in extreme weather conditions we were able to come back. It’s because we have some resiliency. We do have belief in each other. We do have the idea of team. We don’t want to let the other guys down. We battle and we hang in there. We stay together. We don’t point the finger.

“In so doing, I think that there were a lot of things accomplished along those lines with very good leadership, which we had a year ago and we certainly have now.”

New York’s only road trip so far this season was a 41-13 thrashing in Week 2 at St. Louis. That win tied the Giants with Chicago (1940-42), San Francisco (1987-88) and Pittsburgh (2004-05) for the second-longest streak road winning streak history. Only the 49ers, who won 19 straight — 18 regular season, one in the playoffs — have had a longer run on the road.

Browns coach Romeo Crennel has spent the past week praising the Giants, who rank first in several offensive categories and have one of the league’s top defenses.

“I don’t know what else I can say about these guys, they are number one all the way across the board,” Crennel said. “Probably the best team in the NFL at this point.”

Crennel, once an assistant coach on New York’s staff with Coughlin, has been impressed by the Giants’ ability to play at an extremely high level on the road, particularly in the postseason where the pressure is intensified and there is no margin for error.

“I know how tough it is to go through the playoffs and have to go on the road in a playoff atmosphere and have to battle the crowd noise and the change of schedule and all those other things,” he said. “For them to be able to go on the road in the places that they had to go and win, that was impressive.

“The thing that you saw from them is they wouldn’t quit. They just kept playing and they played until the final whistle blew.”

A major disappointment so far this season, the Browns will be hosting their first Monday night game since 2003.