Weathered major storms

From moment one of the 2019 regular season, the Giants found themselves in trouble. Wide receiver Golden Tate was suspended four games for violating the league’s PED policy and it was a steady flow of issues after that.

Wide receiver Sterling Shepard missed multiple games due to a series of concussions, ditto tight end Rhett Ellison, who remains out. Evan Engram dealt with injury issues all season and ultimately landed on season-ending IR, while superstar running back Saquon Barkley missed time and was hindered by a high-ankle sprain.

Daniel Jones also suffered a high-ankle sprain, missing two games, and Tate later missed a fifth game, this time due to concussion. They also lost safety Jabrill Peppers to injury, and had to get through Week 16 without guard Kevin Zeitler. The list of injuries can just go on forever.

Then, of course, there was the whole Janoris Jenkins snafu and subsequent release, which only compounded the defensive issues and forced the team to go younger in the secondary.

Are the Giants alone with the injury issues and other sidebar stories? Of course not, this is the NFL and every team deals with that. But as a second-year head coach with an extremely young roster, that made things more difficult on the Giants than perhaps some of the other NFL teams with deeper rosters.

Through it all, Shurmur kept his team together and somewhat competitive (there have been a lot of games lost in the fourth quarter).