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Mikell: Killer instinct still top task for defense

The flip side of a one-sided game

There is another side to a 59-28 victory -- the side with the 28 on it. For the Eagles' defense, it was an odd bit of business, sitting there with an enormous lead, trading time for yards. It was not natural.

"It's tough when you get in those games," safety Quintin Mikell said the other day. "When you get up so quickly, the team scraps their game plan and basically scraps what you studied for all week and just starts throwing the ball deep or doing all kinds of off-the-wall stuff. So it's tougher for a defense.

"But I think the thing we can take away from that game is the fourth quarter, even when you have a team down like that, you don't want to let up a little bit. We've been dealing with that all year and it's kind of frustrating. I guess that's one thing we can learn from that game."

Everybody is fixated on the test that the Giants' defense will offer to Michael Vick -- that is, the No. 1 ranked defense in the NFL. But don't sleep on the Giants' offense. Nobody is talking about it, but they have scored the sixth-most points in the NFL this season. They are bunched in the rankings with the Titans (who dropped 37 points on the Eagles) and the Colts (who scored 24 in what was the defense's most impressive performance of the season).

It will be a big test here for the unit on the other side of Monday night's blowout.