New York Giants: Sterling Shepard Health Update

The New York Giants‘ training camp got off to a very rocky start. New York was hit with the injury bug leaving fans nervous for the season. The receiving corps, in particular, had to deal with multiple significant injuries.

The Giants lost wide receiver Corey Coleman for the season due to an ACL injury. On top of that, starting receiver Sterling Shepard broke his thumb during the first practice of training camp. Fans feared this injury would leak into the regular season, but fortunately, the injury was not as bad as initially believed.

In fact, Shepard did not miss much time with this thumb injury. Sterling was able to get back to practice the same week he suffered his injury, but he was only catching with one hand.

Now the Giants have given Shepard even more opportunities in practice. Shep has been participating in 11 on 11 drills using both hands to catch the football. The only restriction for Sterling is that he is wearing a yellow non-contact jersey to the defense knows not to rough him up.

This lead to yet another injury scare for the Giants on Monday. Eli Manning and his new, stronger arm, threw a fastball to Shepard during practice. Sterling is still dealing with his thumb fracture, obviously, so this did not have a happy ending.

The ball zipped through Shepard’s hand. Sterling then came away from the play “flexing his left hand,” the hand that has his fractured thumb. A risky play that could have set the Giants’ offense back by weeks.

Fans and reporters on Twitter were very critical of the Giants for putting Sterling Shepard in this unnecessarily risky situation:

But since then, we have not heard anything about Shepard’s thumb. It seems like Sterling is healing quickly and should miss no regular-season playing time. However, Giants fans should not expect to see Sterling Shepard get any playing time during the team’s first preseason game on Thursday against the New York Jets.