The New York Giants enter a different phase of preseason preparations this week. Rosters have to be trimmed to the regular-season limit of 53 players by Sunday, Aug. 30 at 6 p.m. ET. With the regular season now less than three full weeks away, practices will also take on a different tone.
There won’t be any 2½-hour padded practices this week as the Giants look toward their final preseason game. Practices will be two hours in length this week, and head coach John Harbaugh said on Sunday that none will be fully
padded.
Healthy Giants starters played in the Aug. 15 preseason opener against the Minnesota Vikings. Those who the coaching felt needed the work played Saturday, Aug. 22 against the Miami Dolphins.
The Giants have had a grueling — by modern NFL standards — training camp. Edge defender Brian Burns said last week that was part of why the team performed as well as it did in scorching heat during last Thursday’s joint practice with the Dolphins.
“I ain’t gonna lie, if we didn’t practice as hard as we do, I don’t know if we would have made it through this heat,” Burns said. “And the level of competition that we practiced with today. But I feel like us practicing as hard as we do, definitely prepared us for all of this.”
The last thing the Giants want to do between now and the Sept. 13 season-opener against the Dallas Cowboys is dull that competitive edge.
I asked Harbaugh on Sunday about whether the idea that players could go three weeks to a month before that game without live competition will factor into the team’s decision-making. We did not directly discuss playing time in Friday’s preseason finale against the New York Jets.
“Most definitely. Most definitely. You have to factor that in and consider that,” Harbaugh said. “Playing together in a game, communicating together in a game, those things are valuable things that it’s better to have some experience with before you get into the game that counts, so to speak.
“So, yeah, that’s part of it, even the way we practice, what we work on, how we set up our practices. We set up our practices for the week this afternoon and what we needed to work on. That’s definitely a big part of that mindset in terms of how we organize the plays and what we work on. So, big yes to what you asked.”
Harbaugh also acknowledged, in a lengthy answer, how this is a difficult week for players competing for roster spots. In his 19th season as a head coach, he said there is “a human aspect to this whole thing.”
“We tell them your best dream is not too big, matter of fact it might not even be big enough,” Harbaugh said. “And you have the right to go ahead and feel free to hope for all the things that inside you might not even want to tell anybody because for fear that someone might – but if they’re not laughing at your dream then it’s not big enough either, so say it, speak it and go for it.
“And these guys have really done that. I feel like they’ve really put that out there and they’ve talked to each other, they’ve committed to helping one another achieve each other’s dreams, those kinds of things we talk about in our meetings and I know they talk about amongst themselves as a group of guys.”
Trimming a roster from 90 players to 53 is never a fun part of the job.
“This week, to your point, is a very challenging week because there will be guys that won’t be here after this week. Now, maybe they’ll come back,” Harbaugh said. “We brought (defensive lineman) Ben (Barten) back, the defensive lineman who just got released by the Jets and came back to us again here this week. And so, I told him, I said, “Hey, we had this conversation man, I told you you’d be back here.” And I don’t know why I thought he would, but he is. So, maybe you go back to what (Former Giants owner) Wellington Mara famously said, ‘Once a Giant, always a Giant.’ I think that holds true as well. So, you become part of the team, part of the organization, part of the fabric of what it means to be a Giant, and I do think that those guys, they treasure it.
“I know I’m getting a little long-winded, but how many of us that played football wouldn’t have loved to have had an opportunity to be in a football camp in the National Football League? To be invited, to get a try out even? All the not-so-good players like me would have loved that, and I tell these guys, ‘You are the very best. Every single player here in this room is a great football player.’ There is not one football player in an NFL camp who’s not a great football player. You talk about the top .0001 percent of football players, even athletes, in the world that are going to be in a football camp. But then there’s levels to that too, just like there’s levels to anything else, so within that striving to be the best you can be. But I would say everybody, every one of our guys, whether they’re here the next week or they’re not, will look back and say they did their very best, they put their best foot forward, and it’s something that they can look back on really for the rest of their life proudly.”
