Throughout Brian Daboll’s tenure as head coach of the New York Giants, the team faced accusations of “cautionary” training camp practices, and some fans felt it led to slow starts to their seasons.
From 2023 to 2025, the Giants were beaten by a combined score of 89-12 in their opening day matchups, two of them coming in their home stadium.
Under John Harbaugh, New York is facing a different type of offseason program, one that will surely put them to work more often than what Daboll laid out for his teams.
The new head coach is famous for his tough, grueling practices, and surely Giants fans hope it will help their squad get off to a faster start.
After Monday morning’s practice, though, reports indicated that Big Blue is still shaking off the rust roughly a week into camp.
Giants Offense Struggles in the Pouring Rain
ESPN’s Jordan Raanan, present for New York Giants training camp at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, reported Monday afternoon that the offense struggled in the first day of full pads.
“Rough day for the Giants offense in the pouring rain on the first day with full pads,” wrote Raanan in a post on X.
“Ridiculous number of penalties, struggle to gain yards and one ball slipped out of Jaxson Dart’s hand as he was throwing that resulted in an easy Jevon Holland INT. Couldn’t get anything going today.”
The Giants offense has truly been up-and-down according to reports out of camp thus far.
Some days you’ll hear positive notes about the unit, particularly Jaxson Dart, who completed 17 of 24 pass attempts in a padless practice on July 29.
But it’s obvious they’re still adapting to Harbaugh and new offensive coordinator Matt Nagy’s offense, a change of scheme the Giants haven’t dealt with since before the Daboll era.
Naturally, there’s going to be hiccups along the way this early in the process, and fans can only hope the penalties and other mistakes get fine-tuned along the way.
It wasn’t the offense that took the brunt of the criticism, though, as the defense reportedly had its own struggles.
Giants Defense Forced to Do Pushups as Punishment
According to NorthJersey.com’s Art Stapleton, the New York Giants defense faced its fair share of adversity throughout practice on Monday and was even forced to do pushups by new defensive coordinator Dennard Wilson for their mistakes.
“Giants DC Dennard Wilson has defense doing 10 push-ups post-practice for every penalty. They had 4 today, so math mathing means 40 push-ups,” wrote Stapleton in a post on X.
“D.J. Reader joked he will petition for every turnover forced by Giants to subtract 10 push-ups. Two today would’ve had NYG doing just 20.”
Luckily for the Giants’ defense, their saving grace was first-round pick Arvell Reese, who by all accounts had a monster day in practice.
SNY’s Connor Hughes reported that the rookie linebacker “blew up Cam Skattebo on a 3rd and 2 and beat Andrew Thomas for a sack,” which is quite impressive from the 20-year-old.
Clearly, there’s still some growing to do on both sides of the ball from the Giants, but it’s nice to hear the positives when they’re there.
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