The New York Giants have definitely had injury trouble this season and not all of those injuries have been handled in the best way.
It’s looking more and more like Saquon Barkley should have been placed on the bench for the rest of the season, with nothing left to play for and struggling performances since picking up a high ankle sprain, but that’s not the choice that head coach Pat Shurmur made. And now with the Giants at another crossroads when it comes to whether or not they’ll keep a player around or shut him down for the rest of the season, it looks like the team is leaning to the former option.
The player in question this time is safety Jabrill Peppers and his injury is more than just the basic hip injury that some imagined it was initially – in fact, it’s not really a hip injury at all but rather a transverse process fracture, an injury related to the spine area. It might seem like the logical move would be to sit a player that’s dealing with such an injury, but Peppers hasn’t been ruled out just yet by Pat Shurmur.
“My understanding, his too, in terms of the evaluation of it, as I knew yesterday he had a sore back. I guess he can return, it’s kind of relative to pain tolerance. We don’t practice until Wednesday, so we’ll just have to see what the week brings,” Shurmur told reporters.
Describing a transverse process fracture as just a sore back isn’t a good look for the head coach, and while Shurmur likely isn’t well versed in these types of unusual injuries, there’s surely other staff on the Giants’ staff who should inform the head coach of the specifics of situations like this.
Shurmur has shown multiple times this season that his preference is for getting players back out quickly and giving in to their demands to get back on the field rather than considering long term health – whether or not that will come back to bite the Giants during the final stretch of meaningless games remains to be seen.
But if this results in a worse injury being picked up by Peppers, or alternatively by Barkley or Sterling Shepard, Shurmur may just find it held against him when trying to convince ownership to keep him around for at least one more season.