EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Defensive end Robert Ayers Jr. is the New York Giants’ team leader in sacks with five on the season. So why was Ayers not on the field Sunday for the Dallas Cowboys’ final scoring drive, the one in which quarterback Tony Romo had as much as six seconds to scan the field, waiting for a receiver to get open?

The game-deciding play ended with Romo firing a 13-yard touchdown to elusive receiver Dez Bryant with 1:01 left. Final score: Dallas 31, New York 28.

“I can just tell you there were reasons why perhaps Robert wasn’t in there,” Giants coach Tom Coughlin said Monday.

Coughlin didn’t go into specifics, but he did say there was “sound thinking” behind the decision to leave Ayers on the bench for that critical drive.

“If you remember the play in which we jumped (offside), there was a pressure called there,” he said. “I, quite frankly, think that we scared ourselves out of that because of the penalty.”

Coughlin, who reminded reporters that Romo has made a career out of avoiding the pass rush to find open receivers, did, in the end, agree that maybe the decision to remove Ayers wasn’t the best one that could have been made at the time.

“(The coaches) all feel that there should have been more done, more accomplished perhaps even throughout the entire game but definitely in that last drive,” he said. “We’d love to be able to do it over.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, Giants quarterback Eli Manning said he was pleased overall with the work of his team’s reshuffled offensive line.

“I thought they performed well,” he said. “I thought we did a good job running the ball, getting some positive yards. We stayed in good third-down situations. Protected on third down pretty well, had to hold it a little bit on some third-and-longs, and was able to get the ball down the field.”

The new line featured Geoff Schwartz in at right tackle for Justin Pugh, who was inactive due to a quad strain, and veteran Adam Snyder in at left guard for rookie Weston Richburg, the team’s future center who this season is struggling while playing out of position.

Schwartz and Snyder joined holdovers Will Beatty at left tackle, John Jerry at right guard and J.D. Walton at center.

The offensive line allowed two sacks against Manning, who was also hit four times.

“They got a little pressure at times and got a couple sacks, but that is going to happen in a game,” Manning said. “I thought that guys competed and played hard and did a good job. We had a lot of plays, and we were going up-tempo, and they responded well to that.”

–In the fat chance department: Any possibility, however remote it was, for the Giants to win the NFC East this season officially expired with the loss to Dallas.

However, New York still is mathematically alive for a wild card berth, but the Giants would need two primary things to happen.

The first is they getting a lot of help from other NFC teams also vying for a playoff berth. The second, and most important element, is the Giants would have to win their remaining five games.

Moving forward, a wild-card berth doesn’t seem to be atop of the Giants’ priority list largely because the team is stuck in a six-game losing streak.

“You compete to get better,” Manning said when asked if the Giants are competing for a postseason berth. “We’ve got to find ways to get better in some areas and compete, and we want to get a win.

“We work hard, we prepare hard, we are doing good things at practice, we are doing some good things in the game. You see the effort; you see the determination. We want to get a win to get that feeling back. We have to build off some of the good things that we are doing and put it all together in a game.”

If a playoff berth isn’t the focus, then how about finishing the season at .500, which would represent a tiny bit of improvement from last year’s 7-9 finish?

“The record right now is not the most important thing,” defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka said. “The most important thing is playing every game lights out and winning every game that we have. Taking advantage of every opportunity to go out there and get a win because that will salvage or change what we have done in the fact of what we already put out there.

“It is not about getting to a certain number. It is not about changing or doing anything out of the ordinary. It is about playing hard and just getting wins.”