New York Giants: Joe Judge’s Offseason Prep Challenged By Pandemic

The New York Giants, and the rest of the NFL, are still preparing to play the 2020 season – that’s in spite of the current pandemic that’s affecting the entire country right now, and especially the New York-New Jersey area where the Giants are based. Seemingly everything is closed right now and the NFL isn’t an exception to that trend. The Giants have already felt the effects of this by missing out on face to face visits and workouts with prospects leading up to the Draft.

However, life goes on and the team is still getting ready for the season with the assumption that it will be played at the same time as previously expected. The hard part? All of the things that would normally be done face to face have to be done digitally.

It makes integrating new players, of which the Giants have a decent number of, even before the draft, a harder task.

“We’re going to take our time making sure that, first off, all of the players are sound and set up on how to use the software. Before we get into too much of the football, we’re going to make sure that everyone knows where to find all of the information,” Joe Judge said in a Wednesday conference call.

“As a staff right now, we want to make sure we get the installs in the way we want to and, whether our players get back to us this spring or not, they have a solid base on the knowledge of our program so when we start practicing competitively in training camp they have a good start,” Judge continued, stating that the staff will have to try to control what they can control – and at the moment, that isn’t everything.

“Eventually, we will talk as a team in terms of how we’re going to conduct the team, how we’re going to practice. It’s important the players not only know what you’re going to do, but how you’re going to do it. They have to understand where they’re going to fit in the puzzle,” Judge said about the Giants’ future plans for actually practicing.

Learning the playbook, after all, can be done digitally. But running through the plays themselves, on the other hand, can’t be. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean other teams will have an advantage over the Giants because of it – right now, no team in the league is able to practice the way that they want to. As the coronavirus pandemic continues, this is just one of the many branching effects of it, and something the Giants and every other NFL team will have to deal with.