Joe Judge stood in the parking lot talking about the Raiders’ special teams prowess and how Daniel Jones has been handling adversity this season and the extent of Sterling Shepard’s quad injury, trying his best to push forward with football in what he admitted is an “ad lib” day for the Giants.
The setting in which he made those comments – far from the team’s practice field and with a line of players just a few hundred feet away all queued up for an extra round of COVID-19 testing in a trailer – only reinforced the idea of the situation through which the Giants were trying to work.
Judge said 13 players and coaches received positive results on rapid tests issued on Tuesday and were re-tested and isolated. Twelve of their re-tests came back negative but one, running backs coach Burton Burns, was a confirmed positive.
On Wednesday morning there were more positives in the rapid tests. Those players and coaches were again isolated and re-tested and, out of an abundance of caution, the entire team and staff were asked to undergo testing. The results of those tests were to be revealed later on Wednesday.
So in the meantime the Giants dipped into their 2020 playbook, not for X’s and O’s to help them prepare to beat the Raiders on Sunday but for dealing with a pandemic that had, for most of this season, been kept out of the Giants’ inner workings.
“It immediately puts you back in that mode,” Judge said of last year’s diligence and protocols. “You’ve got all of your plans in a vault. We haven’t had to pull them out to this point in the season, but here we are and we’re ready for this.”
To that end, all Giants personnel were masked inside the building and on line for the testing as well. Judge said Burns was at his condo and participating in meetings via Zoom while offensive assistant Jody Wright and senior offensive assistant Freddie Kitchens spent more time that usual with the running backs. The team planned to have two walk-through workouts on Wednesday rather than a single practice which was originally scheduled.
“We’re going to have to draw on the experience we gained last year,” Judge said. “We already started talking in terms of how we might have to alter our practices or our meeting plans for the remainder of the week. We’ll see what the league comes out with [regarding protocols] but we’ll have contingency plans. Will we have to meet virtually? Are we going to be limited in how we are on the field together? What’s going to happen to position groups if we lose certain players?”
None of those questions had answers when Judge left the parking lot on Wednesday morning.
Vaccinated personnel in Tiers 1 and 2 – which for the Giants includes the entire coaching staff and, according to Judge, all but a “very few” players – are required to be tested once per week. The team arrived at its facility from Monday night’s game in Kansas City at about 5 a.m. Tuesday and some players and coaches opted to have their weekly test conducted then upon their arrival. Others waited until they arrived at work Wednesday for their weekly rapid test. Unvaccinated players are tested daily. All of them, regardless of their results, were retested later on Wednesday morning.
The Giants’ practice, which was originally scheduled to begin at 10:50 a.m., was pushed back approximately one hour.
