Eight point five percent.

Just seven weeks after they beat the Cowboys in Dallas and confirmed their third consecutive 6-2 start to a season, the New York Giants appeared to be a lock to win the NFC East. Their odds of winning the NFC East were estimated at 84 percent. Even though they would lose to the Steelers the following week, losses by the Cowboys, Eagles, and Redskins pushed their chances up to 86 percent, with their playoff odds exceeding 90 percent. Dallas and Washington were a combined 6-11, with an 8 percent shot of winning the division between them.

Since then, of course, those two dark horses have gone a combined 11-2. The Giants, as you already know, have capitulated in spectacular fashion. A 2-5 stretch has left them in desperate need of a post-Christmas miracle to somehow squeak their way back into the NFC playoffs. The odds of that actually happening in Week 17: 8.5 percent.

Big Blue's path into the postseason is as clear as it is unlikely. For the Giants to make the playoffs, they need to beat the Eagles and have three other games go their way. The Redskins need to beat the Cowboys, giving them the NFC East and knocking the Cowboys out of the playoffs. The Packers need to beat the Vikings, pushing them out of the way, and the lowly Lions need to show up at home and beat the Bears. Using the log5 method I wrote about last year, I've estimated the odds of each event happening:

The Giants are lucky that the Redskins and Lions are both at home. In addition, San Francisco's loss to Seattle on Sunday night has helped give the Packers further motivation to show up and play next weekend, as a win by Green Bay would now secure them a first-round bye. Even with those advantages, though, the Giants still only have less than a one-in-10 shot of making this all work.

There is, however, a recent precedent to which Giants fans might choose to cling. The 2008 Philadelphia Eagles faced a similarly steep climb to make it into the playoffs in Week 17 after losing to a Mid-Atlantic team (the Redskins) in Week 16. First, the Eagles needed the Raiders to travel to the East Coast for a 1 p.m. game without star corner Nnamdi Asomugha and beat the Buccaneers, who controlled their own playoff destiny. Somehow, JaMarcus Russell led the Raiders to a 31-24 victory, in a game that led to Jon Gruden being fired weeks later. Then, the 7-8 Texans had to beat the Bears at home, which they managed to pull off. With those two results in their back pocket, the Eagles hosted the Cowboys at 4:05 p.m. and played one of the most memorable games of the Andy Reid era, stomping Dallas 44-6 and beginning a run that would eventually take them to the NFC Championship Game. I estimated their odds of making the playoffs before the day at right around 5 percent. It's possible, but boy, is it unlikely.

The Giants are no strangers to late-season collapses, of course, but this one is different. In the past, New York's declines have almost always been driven by a collapsing pass defense. Although the Giants were awful against a recently disappointing Ravens passing attack on Sunday, that really hasn't been the cause of their problems this year. If you want to blame the pass defense, you can start wondering aloud where that dominant Giants pass rush has spent the season vacationing: In situations where one team leads the other by 14 points or fewer, the Giants sacked opposing quarterbacks 6.6 percent of the time during the first half, but have pulled off just three sacks in 108 drop-backs in those same situations in the second half, a grisly 2.8 percent sack rate. Jason Pierre-Paul is leading the team with just 6.5 sacks, a 10-sack dropoff from a year ago, while the Giants have only gotten nine combined sacks from stalwarts Osi Umenyiora and Justin Tuck.

Instead, the blame for this second-half swoon should fall further upon the shoulders of the offense. While the defense has allowed 25.1 points per game during the 2-5 collapse after giving up 20.1 points per game during the 6-2 start, the offense has fallen off even further. After averaging 29.3 points per game through their first eight contests, Eli Manning's crew is down to just 21.9 points per game, a difference of 7.4 points per tilt. There is a very clear line of demarcation with the Giants this year: When they score more than 21 points per game, the Giants are 8-0. When they score fewer than 21 points per game, as was the case with the Baltimore game yesterday, they are now 0-7.

The passing offense, in particular, stopped producing significant chunks of yardage. On first-and-10 plays in the aforementioned two-score situations, the 6-2 Giants averaged over 7.7 yards per pass, the 11th-best rate in the league. That figure is down to 5.4 yards over the seven ensuing games, which places the Giants 22nd. The Giants are picking up third downs about as frequently — 41 percent during the hot streak, 38 percent since, including an 0-for-4 performance during the two-score portion of yesterday's game — but they're averaging nearly three fewer yards per play on those third downs.

As you might suspect, those per-play declines are foretelling a dramatic drop in big plays from the New York offense. The Giants had 32 plays for 20 yards or more over their first eight games in those 14-points-or-fewer scenarios, which was the sixth-best rate in football. Over the next seven games, they produced just 12 such plays, a figure that places them with the likes of the Jets and Cardinals at the bottom of the league. And if you figure that Manning is getting shorter windows to throw in, you would be right, as the Giants' sack rate on offense has climbed. While Manning was taken down just 1.9 percent of the time on drop-backs in 14-point games during the first half of the season, that rate has risen to 6.7 percent during the second half.

There's one more factor that's hurt the Giants, one that often comes up to bite them during the second-half malaises: strength of schedule. During the first half of the season, New York played a schedule with teams who were a combined 50-51-1 in games that didn't involve the Giants. In the second half, the worst team they've played is the Saints, who aren't all that bad. The seven teams the Giants have played in the second half have a combined record, excluding their games with New York, of 55-35. Basically, the Giants have gone from playing an 8-8 team every week to a 10-6 team. That's going to make it harder to consistently win every time.

Of course, you'll hear various soft factors thrown around as excuses for the Giants. You've already probably read that they didn't show up for the Ravens game, an argument that sounds suspiciously like their famed propensity for quitting on Tom Coughlin. They might have the "Super Bowl hangover," as Terry Bradshaw claimed yesterday, but that doesn't really jibe with their performance; if they...