Greg Schiano claims that his team did nothing wrong by diving at the knees of the NY line on the game-ending kneel down play.

from an ESPN article on the issue:
Schiano said it was a play he'd run before at Rutgers, and he would do it again. He said that he and Coughlin had "some stuff we needed to hash out" after the game. But it did not seem as if the coaches found any common ground before a terse handshake.

"I don't know if that's not something that's not done in the National Football League, but what I do with our football team is we fight until they tell us game over," Schiano said. "There's nothing dirty about it and there's nothing illegal about it.

"We crowd the ball -- it's like a sneak defense and you try to knock it loose. Watch Rutgers, they would know if they watched us that's what we did at the end of the game."

Maybe it's not illegal, but then neither is throwing deep with a double digit lead in the fourth quarter. There are just some things you aren't supposed to do at a professional level. Running up the score is one of them, and at a certain point, games are all but over, and the kneel-down is one way for a team to end the game gracefully without risking injuries on either team by playing unnecessary downs that won't change anything.

Back when the Patriots were giving the world the figurative middle finger by running up scores the year of Spygate, they were good enough to immunize themselves from retribution. If anyone wanted to retaliate against New England, they would have to get in position to run up the score on the Pats, which back then was easier said than done. Tampa Bay, on the other hand, is very likely to be on the down side of the score late in the game with the other team left to ponder "Should we rack up more yards and embarass our opponent, or just kneel down politely to get it over with?" Given how Tampa Bay accepts such gestures, what is the motivation to kneel? With a bunch of defenders diving at your players' knees, avoiding injury isn't a plausible reason. And of course, if Tampa gets in the same situation the Giants were in today, they have no reason to complain about any tactic by the defense to get their hands on the ball.

Pulling that kind of unsportsmanlike crap when you're losing is just asking to get it back, coming AND going.