Joe Judge being tested in unusual ways at start of NY Giants tenure

2. COVID-19 Pandemic

Now obviously this is something each and every NFL coach has had to work with and around in 2020, but it hits harder for the NY Giants rookie coach when combined with the other factors on this list.

Namely, combining it with the previously stated whole new coaching staff and youngest team in the league thing, as those hundreds of lost hours due to this pandemic were set to benefit the NY Giants maybe more than any other team in the league.

Just for starters, getting on the same page with his second-year stud QB, Daniel Jones, would have been hard enough with just the offseason time missed up to this point, as the spring months would usually be the time where a new head coach and a young QB got to learn about each other and bond.

Instead, Judge won’t get his first look at Danny Dimes in a real practice until the beginning of August at the earliest, and that’s if we don’t have any more pushback or concessions.

Normally, Judge would have spent hundreds of hours in the meeting rooms along with new offensive coordinator Jason Garrett, getting to understand the mind of Daniel Jones while working together to come up with an offensive that best suited him, something he said would be a main strategy from the beginning and something we saw the opposite out of in Pat Shurmur.

It would have been a difficult enough assignment in a typical year already, as Judge would be learning on the fly himself and spending major time just coming up with his practice regiment and set of standards.

However, the COVID Pandemic has made that near impossible, as I’m sure the young coach never imagined he’d do the majority of his work – including the NFL draft – from his home via Zoom.

Not exactly an enviable situation.