NY Giants receive terrific news about training camp and preseason
The NFL has officially announced that it is permitted official training camps to begin at the end of July and that there will be a condensed preseason. Here’s what it means for the NY Giants.
After months of what seemed like day after day of bad news relating to the prospects of playing professional sports in 2020, the NFL released this bomb which should excite all NY Giants – and NFL fans – in general.
New Jersey Governor, Phil Murphy, already had cleared the way for sports teams to begin practicing if they so chose, but the NY Giants were still at the mercy of the NFL when it came to that. Now, that hurdle has been cleared, and barring any further COVID-19 flare-ups it looks like we’ll be officially having NFL football in 2020.
Just a short time ago, it seemed unfathomable that any type of training camp or preseason would take place with how rough of shape that country was in. However, with the COVID numbers improving day-by-day (for the most part), it looks as though we will in fact not just get games, but practices and preseason games too.
What does this mean for the NY Giants’ schedule?
According to CBSSports.com, all but four teams (the Texans, Cheifs, Cowboys, and Steelers) will officially open training camp on July 28th. The reason those other four teams won’t open up on the same day is because they have earlier scheduled preseason games, so they’re slated to get thing going on July 25th.
Although there hasn’t been an official ruling on the reduction of preseason games, it’s been all but finalized and it looks as though teams will get to play two preseason games apiece. The NY Giants went as far to tweet about a time change to their now opening preseason contest against the Packers on August 29th.
This news is nothing short of fantastic, as new head coach, Joe Judge, and his staff were going to be in a rough position should they have had to play regular-season games without an official training camp or any preseason action.
Now, all that will be missing from this offseason will be rookie mini-camps and voluntary OTA’s, which have been done virtually and will continue to be up until the official start date.
Things may have seemed very grim even just a few weeks ago, but I have to commend the NFL on how they’ve handled this thing from the beginning, all the way back to the NFL Draft.
Instead of just cancelling everything with no direct plan of getting into the action, they sat back and watched how things developed, and it turns out they’ve developed pretty well as the country is slowly – but surely – recovering from this devastating COVID-19 pandemic.
One more positive from this news is that it gives the NFL more time to evaluate and come up with proper protocols and plans on how to operate on game day.
In an unparalleled situation such as this, I think everyone can agree that’s a good thing.
So while these last few months have been rough for sports fans, we can now start to feel hopeful and excited again as it appears that NY Giants football will be in full swing come September.