The New York Giants lead the NFL in man-games lost since 2009 and that trend is likely to continue here in 2023.
Injuries have devastated the Giants this season and are not letting up as the team enters its bye week. By the end of the season, it’s very likely that New York will again top the league in man-games lost.
“Don’t want to make any excuses. We’ve had some injuries,” general manager Joe Schoen told reporters on Monday. “We’ve just got to continue to build the depth and we’ve got to continue to build the team all around so when injuries do occur, we can overcome those and still be competitive when injuries happen. It’s going to happen every year. It happens. It’s football; it’s a contact sport. There’s going to be injuries, and we’ve got to be able to overcome any type of adversity that presents itself.”
But the Giants haven’t been able to overcome that adversity, especially along the offensive line, which has been hit especially hard.
“Andrew Thomas getting hurt the first series of the game of the season. That doesn’t help when you lose an All-Pro left tackle,” Schoen said. “I think through 11 weeks, we had nine different starting o-line combinations, which is the second-most in 15 years. We have 21 different O-line combinations, which is the fourth-most in 15 years. So, we were down to our fifth and sixth offensive tackles. It’s hard to prepare for that when you have eight or nine on the roster.”
When Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll arrived on the scene, one of the first things they promised to address was the injury issues. They intended to do a deep dive in order to determine why the Giants continue to be among the league’s most-injured teams and part of the solution was to change the MetLife Stadium turf.
Despite their goals, a solution has not been uncovered.
“We’re going to continue to evaluate that,” Schoen said. “I wish it was one specific injury. It just hasn’t been a consistent (problem). If you could look and say, ‘Man, we have seven guys that have the same injury,’ you could really do a deep dive on what do we need to do to improve what we’re doing in that area, but there hasn’t been a consistent, other than we’ve been injured often. I have a lot of confidence in our training staff and (head athletic trainer) Ronnie Barnes and our strength staff with (director of strength and conditioning Craig) Fitz(gerald).
“We’re going to continue to look under every rock for any competitive advantage we can get from sports science, training, strength and conditioning, whatever it may be because it is, it’s hard to go in and compete week in and week out if you don’t have your best players. One of the guys was telling me the other day, going into the season, if you told me (tight end Darren) Waller, (tackle) Andrew Thomas, Saquon and Daniel would play less than 40 plays together, I wouldn’t have been real excited about that, and that’s the reality of how it played out.”
It certainly hasn’t been ideal but this isn’t a new issue for the Giants. It’s the exact same one that has plagued previous regimes and cost people jobs. At some point or another, someone has to figure it out.
