When the New York Giants signed Joe Judge as head coach, they were making an intentional choice to take some elements from the Patriots organization. At least, that was the intention. When it came to execution, Judge fell far short of installing the Patriots way in East Rutherford. His methods gained notoriety around the league for the wrong reasons, and by the end, his attempts to appear hard-nosed and tough made him look like someone who’d completely lost touch with the situation.
One of the things that Judge tried to bring over was New England’s style of practice. But from the results and from reports that are coming out now that his tenure is said and done, it doesn’t look like it was a very successful attempt.
https://twitter.com/rydunleavy/status/1486810977895165952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
According to Ryan Dunleavy, this tough style of practices was unpopular even among the players that did like Judge. And they definitely weren’t appreciated once injuries piled up.
The practices received attention this offseason when Judge made headlines for making players run laps for various mistakes. It wasn’t so unpopular back then, and it wasn’t hard to see why. On paper, it sounds like a good idea to focus on discipline and punish mistakes as a way to improve a losing team. But as the season went on, the results never improved and running laps became the source of many jokes about Judge’s coaching.
Part of being a good coach is knowing when to adapt, and apparently, Judge did a poor job of that. It’s hard to tell how much it ultimately played into his firing, but given the obvious low morale towards the end of the season, it’s hard to say it had no effect either.