The New York Giants have a very different looking roster than they did last season, with one of the highest rates of player turnover in the league so far, and a number of new additions who weren’t there in 2019 will take the field for the team this fall.
However, those aren’t the only new faces that might show up in the lineup. The Giants have some players who were on the roster last year but didn’t get to play much or at all because injuries took them out early.
Two players in specific stand out a Giants that could make a splash after bouncing back from an injury from last year.
WR Corey Coleman
The team might have a competition at the receiver position if Sterling Shepard and Golden Tate don’t return at the top of their game, and one of the competitors may be Corey Coleman. While Darius Slayton broke out last year and is the obvious choice to have a bigger role in 2020, Coleman is a near unknown factor.
That’s because Coleman didn’t play at all last season, tearing his ACL on the first day of training camp instead.
The 25 year old has three prior seasons before his injury, where his best performance came in his rookie year where he caught three touchdown passes and 413 yards. Not the world’s most impressive numbers, but at this age, there’s still time to improve.
At 5’11”, Coleman doesn’t quite fit the role of a big bodied receiver and is likely to end up in competition with Shepard, who is only an inch apart in height. But this might not be such a bad spot. Shepard struggled last season with concussions, and if he misses time again, the Giants will need further depth to compensate for his absence.
That, of course, is a chance for the previously injured Coleman to play a larger role.
ILB Ryan Connelly
The Giants have another player that didn’t get to do much during the 2019 season before getting put out of action by an ACL tear. That was the fate that Ryan Connelly shared with Coleman, except Connelly was already off to a hot start in the league by the time it happened.
Connelly ended up starting 3 games in 4 overall appearances during his rookie season. He had 20 total tackles and one sack, and it looked like he was set to breathe new life into the inside linebacker position as a recent steal in the draft.
However, the ACL tear ended his hopes of making that kind of impact last season.
Unfortunately for Connelly, he has increased competition now that the Giants have had time to shop in free agency. Blake Martinez is a big name new addition at his position and fans will expect to see Martinez make an immediate and big impact for the cost the Giants are spending on him.
David Mayo also became established in the linebacker group last season, and following the assumption that Martinez is an automatic starter, it looks like Connelly may compete heavily with Mayo for time in the rotation.
Despite this, Connelly still has a chance to make an impact – it’s unknown how fast he’ll get back to his form from the early 2019 season, and it may help to come off the bench this year with others handling the bulk of the snaps at inside linebacker. After all, inside linebacker is known as a position that requires more depth than others.