It's always dangerous making the Thursday night game your best bet and advocating starting several players in it and even worse when it's your own real-life team; if things go south, it's a long wait until Sunday. Fortunately, the Giants delivered. Big time.

• Eli Manning looks like Aaron Rodgers in Ben McAdoo's new West Coast offense, making all the throws, suddenly moving well in the pocket and even rushing for a score. While Manning isn't the athlete Rodgers is, I'd rate him as a top-12 quarterback the rest of the way ahead of Cam Newton, Tom Brady and Andy Dalton.

• Larry Donnell had a huge game, but he's more the Martellus Bennett in the offense, a third option after Victor Cruz and Rueben Randle. Eventually - Week 5? - Odell Beckham will be back too. But there are worse things to be than Bennett, especially if the offense continues to be this efficient.

• Victor Cruz had a bad drop on a third and five, and Manning just missed him on two deep plays. Even though Cruz broke 100 yards, he could have had an absolutely monster game.

• Rueben Randle got his targets and made the most of them. I thought his catch/INT was actually a touchdown, too. It makes no sense how a ball carrier barely has to graze the pylon with the ball before dropping it, but a receiver who has possession and both feet down has to make a "football move" before it counts. Why would you make a football move once you're in the end zone anyway? The rules make about as much sense as Roger Goodell's account of what the NFL knew about the Ray Rice tape.

• Andre Williams looked good, albeit against a tired Redskins defense. I think the split will be 65/35 Rashad Jennings going forward, but Williams isn't much of a threat to take the job because he can't catch (to be fair, Jennings dropped a short pass that would have been an easy touchdown.)

• Kirk Cousins looked sharp early then completely devolved in the second half, throwing every other pass up for grabs, it seemed. While he looked great against the Jaguars at home and the Eagles in a shootout, a lot of the fantasy punditry got ahead of itself with the hype. We'll see how he picks up the pieces - remember Nick Foles looked awful against Dallas last year before throwing seven TDs against the Raiders and never looking back. But that's the rare exception - my guess is Cousins will settle in at the level of last year's Carson Palmer - at least until RGIII comes back.

• The Giants defense played great for most of the game, but they were shredded on a drive to open the second half and gave up a couple big plays. They also hurt themselves with a third-and-five jump offsides that resulted in a TD-drive and got jobbed on the Niles Paul hit where Will Demps was going low for the body, but Paul lowered his helmet at the last second and took it on the head. It's insane that personal fouls - which are often ticky-tack or flat-out wrong - are not reviewable. Moreover, they called Paul a "defenseless receiver" but gave him the catch! How can he be defenseless if he's running with the ball in his hands when he gets hit?

• I vowed not to watch the Derek Jeter farewell tour because farewell tours are stupid and undermine the game's integrity. Sports are great when everyone's competing their hardest, not putting on a sideshow as a marketing gimmick. I watched Jeter help win World Series titles for the Yankees in the '90s and play great in the aughts, and that was enough. The lily needs no gilding in this case. He was a great player. But when my Twitter timeline told me he was at-bat with the go-ahead run on second, I had to tune in for a minute. And of course he delivered with a walk-off single. And I have to admit - even if the conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether it wasn't a batting-practice fastball to stage the event - it was pretty cool.