The end of the NFL preseason usually means that real football isn’t far off from starting. But as teams around the league, including the New York Giants, who as of Sunday night only made a dozen roster transactions to trim their 90-man roster down to the league limit of 53, shift their attention to the first opponent on the schedule, the Giants are using part of this upcoming week to polish up their fundamentals, as they remain in training camp mode.
“When you're getting ready to play the start of the season, I think the most important thing is to get your team ready,” head coach Brian Daboll said Sunday when asked about the balance between finalizing the roster and turning one’s attention to the first opponent–the Minnesota Vikings–on the schedule.
“Early on in the season, you don't really know what other teams… You can go back and study them (other teams) all you want and get tendencies and things like that and look at preseason games. Some of our younger coaches have been doing that and breaking down tape and doing all those things.
“We've really been focused on our team and our fundamentals and the things that we can do to improve for us. If you start too early on a team, which we don't do with the players, I think it can get stale.”
To be clear, the Giants have done some work on all the teams on their schedule, so it won’t be as though they’re waiting until the last minute to gameplan. But to Daboll’s point, while one can look at a particular coaching staff’s tendencies, until the other teams’ rosters are set, specific gameplanning as far as matchups is something that might have to wait a few days.
But on the flip side, there is the argument about a team looking and being ready for Week 1. Last year for example, the Giants were steamrolled by the Dallas Cowboys in Week 1, the game unraveling almost immediately after what started out as a promising opening drive for the Giants which stalled and then resulted in a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown.
The Giants never recovered from that punch in the mouth, losing that game 40-0 in what was an overall embarrassing showing and a sign of what was yet to come.
Daboll is hoping that the changes he made to how the team’s training camp was structured–it was tougher and more team-drill orientated than the one he ran in 2023–have laid a better foundation for success.
That’s why he wants to spend these last few days of what’s being regarded as “training camp” even though they won’t have the roster numbers to necessarily run the practices as they would a true training camp session.
“There's certainly things from the start of training camp to now that I'd say the defense needs to correct some things, the offense, the special teams. We'll compete against one another. We'll also do some carded things on plays we think or situations that we think each side needs,” Daboll said.
“After these cuts, you have two weeks. In two weeks time, we'll be playing right now. We've done some work. We'll continue to do work as a coaching staff, but the focus for the players will be the things we need to fix throughout training camp. We'll get into Minnesota soon enough, but not these next couple of days”.
