Judge wants team seeing playoffs through lens

NEW YORK — The Giants are not in the playoffs, but Joe Judge is making sure they are into the playoffs.

Before they departed at the conclusion of the regular season last week, the head coach gave his players one final assignment. It wasn’t anything grueling or something the union might have to step in to stop. It was actually something most of them were going to do anyway.

He wanted them to watch football.

“I talked to our players before we left. I said: ‘When you watch these games, sit back, relax, allow yourself to just watch and enjoy the games,’ ” Judge said in an appearance on WFAN on Tuesday morning. “‘But also watch the game from the lens through which you have learned to see it. Look at the situations, look at the things that really impact the game: turnovers, penalties, mental errors.

Take a look at something someone could have done differently and how we would have handled it and really try to look through that lens.’ ”

That’s something Judge and the coaches do, too. Judge said he sat and watched all six of the wild card games this past weekend with his sons, but while he was mostly in dad world he still was partly in coach mode.

Judge admitted it can be “frustrating” to be a spectator for the playoffs. This is, in fact, the first time since very early in his coaching career that he has not participated in a postseason game of some sort, whether it was a bowl game with Alabama or the NFL playoffs with the Patriots.

Watching and playing, he said, he comes away with the same conclusion.

“When you get to playoff football, it all comes down to execution,” he said. “Obviously the intensity is up, but it’s always a couple of plays. Very rarely is it a blowout, right?”