NEW YORK. The Giants are a lousy home team this season, losing more games than they win before an increasingly impatient and gloomy audience. If the NFL were an equitable association, that wouldn't be a problem on Sunday, because they would be playing at the Louisiana Superdome.

This game against the Saints, a big one for both teams, belongs in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, payback for last season's famous "road opener" for the Giants at the Meadowlands. But for some reason, this issue was never discussed by the league, despite the positive economic impact it might have had on the star-crossed Southern city.

It would have been a simple matter at one time, though surely it is way too late now. After Hurricane Katrina and the Superdome disaster, the Giants should have agreed to a simple flip-flop of games with the Saints, over two successive seasons. The Giants would play in East Rutherford in 2005, while the Saints played host to the inter-divisional game in 2006. The Giants would have had nine home games last season and only seven this year, but it would have come out even.

Instead, the NFL has stolen this game from New Orleans, and Giant fans get an extra ticket out of it. They get to cheer their .500 team all the way to a .533 or .467 mark, and then figure out the wild-card permutations without leaving the area.

"No, it was never raised," responded Greg Aiello, the league spokesman. "The 2005 Saints season presented an unprecedented set of circumstances. The game was played in New York last year because it couldn't be played in New Orleans. It was part of a larger effort to make the Saints' first `home' game a big event, bring more awareness to the Gulf Coast tragedy and raise funds for recovery and relief.

"The 2006 season is a different season. There is nothing that prohibits this year's game from being played in New York, where it is scheduled to be played."

It shouldn't have been scheduled here in the first place. A home football game is worth a lot of money to a city. That's what the NFL keeps telling us, anyway, whenever it wants taxpayers to build a new stadium for one of its franchises.

"The players here haven't said anything, though I hear the fans say the league should pay us back," said Peter Finney, sports columnist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "You definitely see a difference when there's a game here. The bars fill up. At 3 o'clock, the people start coming in. Business is two hundred percent better when the Saints win here. On Mondays, our newsstand sales increase by 13,000 after the Saints win."

This is not to pretend that a football team, or its revenues, can heal the kind of wounds suffered by New Orleans. The money made in the French Quarter does not necessarily make its way to the poor black neighborhoods that have been shattered and ignored since the storm

But the Saints can do what they can do. "They've helped the city," Finney said. "Nobody can believe this team."

New Orleans has been the host of the Super Bowl nine times in the past, and it would seem that the NFL owes something to this family member.

"The Saints played other `home' games in Baton Rouge and San Antonio," Aiello argued, rhetorically. "To square things, should the teams they played in those games be forced to play their next `home' game against the Saints in a neutral site?"

The answer to that is, of course, no. This is not about competitive fairness so much as it is about an economic boost in a time of need.

Instead of traveling down to New Orleans, however, the Giants are just trying to figure out why they can't win at home. They beat the Eagles in Philly; lost to them at home. They beat the Cowboys in Dallas; lost to them at home.

Tom Coughlin said he talked to his players about that Monday, told them they owed their fans "an outstanding performance." Barry Cofield said the team should be doing better at Giants Stadium. "It's not a disadvantage to play at home," Cofield said. "This is just coincidence. There's definitely no method to the madness."

As if the Giants don't have enough problems right now, they ought to feel guilty just running out of the tunnel on Sunday onto the wrong field.