NY Giants fight: Inside the fallout, consequences from Joe Judge

NY Giants coach Joe Judge explained why he immediately sent his team running gassers and doing pushups following a full-team fight in practice

It was evident Tuesday that NY Giants head coach Joe Judge was apoplectic at his team for a full-squad brawl that ended practice early.

“My message to the team is insignificant,” Judge says. “The result of what happened is what the consequence is going to be, and we can’t have that. We can’t coach that”

Judge threw his entire team off the field, but not before launching into an expletive-laden lecture to his roster in between sending them on three sets of 100-yard wind sprints and ordering two sets of 10 pushups along the goal-line.

"“There’s a lot of different ways to approach things,” Judge said Wednesday during a conference call with reporters. “As far as fights, my policy has been to get guys out of practice, so, that happened involving the entire team [so] I threw the entire team out of practice.“We had more ball to go. We had two more periods left in practice. We had things we needed to accomplish, those were things yesterday that robbed us of an opportunity to prepare and robbed players of reps to compete.”"

NY Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, who ended up at the bottom of the massive pile that converged after safety Logan Ryan leveled tight end Evan Engram from behind following a big run up the middle by running back Corey Clement, said Wednesday he understands what Judge was trying to accomplish.

“I think we got the message,” Jones said.

While fights during training camp somewhat of a training camp rite of passage in the NFL, Judge is far more concerned with setting the tone for the season and individual games during his practices, which is what drew his ire.

"“When you get a 15-yard penalty, you have to run that much further to score,” Judge said. “When you have a consequence of that, where you have to run right away, that reinforces that ‘hey, I can’t make that mistake.’ When there’s an issue with ball-handling, substitutions, lack of focus, whatever it may be, there needs to be some kind of reinforcement right away. It’s not always running. Sometimes it is.”"

The root of Judge’s ire was the fact that if Ryan had made the same hit on Engram in a game, or if there was a fight on the field, penalty flags would have flown, and the NY Giants can’t have that.

Ryan, who was among the first players involved in the fracas joked afterwards that he would ask Engram what he’s having for lunch when he returned to his locker stall next-door to the veteran tight end, rather than harbor any ill-will.

According to Judge, there hasn’t been any spillover from the fight.

“We had no issues in our locker room,” Judge said. “There were no issues in the cafeteria, the training room, anywhere else. I wouldn’t say our guys are laughing off the situation, but they understand we’re all one team and we can’t do that to each other.”

Matt Lombardo is FanSided’s National NFL Insider and writes Between The Hash Marks each Wednesday. Email Matt: Matt.Lombardo@FanSided.com