Around the scheduled end time for a two-hour practice, Joe Judge called the Giants in and cut the music.
The silence quickly became clear that this was not the end. It was a new start.
The judge tore his team apart with colorful language during a short break in an otherwise non-stop practice on a hot Monday morning, and he liked the response during the extended 30 minutes of mostly two-minute drills 11 against. 11 and other drive-the-field. action.
“They definitely ended with good intensity in training, competing at the end,” said the judge after literally and figuratively calming down. “We have to get to where we are on a day off and we start abruptly. It’s definitely something we need to work on as a team and improve.
The maximums allowed in NFL training camp are a 2.5 hour practice plus an hour of touring. The Giants didn’t waste a minute at the end or during their window.
The judge said several players – Shane Lemieux, Spencer Pulley, Rysen John and Jabrill Peppers – were being treated by coaches and left training with “cramps” despite the staff’s emphasis on hydration. The rest of the squad trained in multiple simultaneous groups at a breakneck pace on two courts, with plenty of team situation drills – a sign that the regular season is fast approaching.
A special teams period ended as the judge gathered the 81 players and staff together to leave no doubt what he wanted to see.
“We definitely got good quality work,” said Judge. “You appreciate the opportunity in a camp where you can work on sustained routes. You have to incorporate soccer conditioning while playing soccer. We did a lot of work with the post-workout conditioning and tried to work through the exercises to finish everything to build our endurance. Really, it comes down to bottom-to-bottom play with the right intensity and the right technique. Our guys really did this today to finish the practice.
Sean Spencer is like a knight tasked with slaying a fire-breathing dragon. Where is the similarity?
The first-year defensive line coach is trying to succeed where so many others of his genre – post coaches and coordinators of the Jets and Giants – have failed: namely, to unleash the potential of Leonard Williams.
Williams, a 2015 first-round pick and a 2016 Pro Bowler, has one of the lowest pressure-to-bag ratios in the NFL as he regularly enters the backfield but is one step away from tackling the. quarterback. Same old story with the Giants last season after a Jets trade, so there are a lot of skeptics reading this:
“I think he’s starting to put it all together,” Spencer said. “He always had the tools. He looks strong, powerful. We have to take him from being a great athlete to developing as a football player, and I think he’s working on it now.
The two Giants staff members who received false positive COVID-19 tests as part of a spate of league-wide spurious results from a New Jersey lab returned to work on Monday. The same was true for two other staff members isolated at home as part of the contact tracing.
The Giants used point-of-service testing and standard PCR testing in a drive-through environment so as not to risk contaminating the daily test trailer used by other members of the organization. All subsequent tests were negative.
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