Finally! Meaningful football has arrived.

NFL Kickoff 2012 between the Super Bowl champion New York Giants and rival Dallas Cowboys blasts of tonight at 8:30 ET.

Former Giants wide receiver Amani Toomer told “NFL AM” on Wednesday morning that the long wait until game time — especially for a prime-time start — can affect the players’ psyche.

“Having to wait around the whole day getting more and more nervous,” he said. “They got a lot of time to think about it. Worse than that, they have a lot of time for the coaches to add extra meetings and that is the things I hated as a player, those extra, impromptu meetings that would go over the same stuff that we went over the whole week.”

Toomer said all the noise coming from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones this offseason will actually help the Giants dust off any rust and push aside any post-Super Bowl nerves.

“Players, they take all that stuff in and they use it for that extra energy, that extra mental focus that you need,” the Super Bowl-winning wide receiver said. “I think Jerry Jones is just helping the Giants out, because they are the team that needs to fight against complacency. They’re coming off a Super Bowl victory and so giving them extra fire, giving them extra fuel is just playing right into the Giants’ hands.”

Shockingly, the man in the Giants’ Ring of Honor picked the G-Men to win the season opener, 21-17, citing Jason Witten’s questionable status as having a huge impact on the game.

Toomer also took the opportunity to take a shot at his former Giants teammate Michael Starhan, who began his tenure as the co-host on “Live with Kelly and Michael” yesterday.

“Hopefully now that he has all this extra income he’s going to be able to fix that gap between his teeth, he kinda likes it, I don’t know why,” Toomer said.

Zing!

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