The 2020 NFL season is already different from any year we’ve ever seen and teams are trying their best to normalize things. On Saturday, the New York Giants ran a simulated game, basically between the offense and the defense with the scoring based on a system devised by the coaching staff to gauge performance.
They will change things up a bit for this Thursday’s scrimmage since the season is just two weeks away and there are so many issues to be ironed out.
The Giants must pare their roster down to 53 players by 4:00 p.m. ET on Saturday but the good thing is that many of the players cut could end up back with them on Sunday via the expanded practice squad, which has a 16-player limit this season, up from 12 last year.
On Sunday, Judge outlined what would be different for this Thursday’s scrimmage, mainly that it will be more like a practice than a simulated game.
“We’re going to replicate some of the in-game things in terms of communication, tablets, some of the operational things, just so we have another go-around as a coaching staff and building some of the communication on the sideline with our players. But it will look a lot more like some of the practices you guys have been at. More like the first scrimmage than the second one if that makes sense,” Judge told reporters.
“We’re going to go ahead and work offense vs. defense, we’ll build in some specific situations we have to hit, and then we’ll just have the move the field periods where we go ahead and let them play ball. It’s not going to be an exact simulated game like you saw the other night, but we’re going to try to replicate all of the operational stuff for the team. We don’t need to simulate a halftime, we’ve been through that. We will work on our overall pregame warmup so they understand the timing and get our bodies prepared for a competition.
“That’s important really for the young guys. That’s a difference from what they may have done in college and definitely different from what they’ve done in practice to this point leading up. We’ll have to build in some of that aspects of the game. Other than that, it’ll be a lot of practice-focused stuff where we’ll work.”
The Giants have many roster decisions to make, and difficult ones at that. There has been massive turnover on this team since Dave Gettleman took over as general manager in December of 2017.
Only three players on the roster Gettleman inherited (Sterling Shepard, Evan Engram and Wayne Gallman) are still with the team. When the Giants open the season against the Pittsburgh Steelers in two weeks, they will have 12 different starters (six on offense and six on defense) from this time a year ago.
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