Torn ACL ends Shep’s season
The players in the Giants’ locker room choked back their emotion late Monday night, hoping against all odds that receiver Sterling Shepard might play again this season.
He won’t. Shepard suffered a torn ACL in his left knee on the final Giants’ offensive snap of a 23-16 loss to the Cowboys, head coach Brian Daboll revealed Tuesday. It’s the same leg in which Shepard suffered a torn Achilles tendon last December.
“He’s a tremendous person, and he worked so diligently to get back,” Daboll said. “I feel terrible for him that he had that injury. Big part of our team and we’ll miss him out on the field.”
The longest-tenured Giant — and only remaining member of the 2016 playoff roster — is looked at as the ultimate warrior by many of his teammates who understand the grueling work it took for Shepard to be ready for the start of this season in an eight-month recovery from the torn Achilles.
“That’s the worst thing that happened [Monday],” center Jon Feliciano said after the game. “Losing to a division opponent is never great, but it’s Week 3. Losing Shep, seeing him down on the ground … it’ll be tough just not having him around.”
What made Shepard’s cruel fate even harder to accept was that he was just jogging away from the ball and any contact when he pulled up, grabbed his knee and fell to the ground. The whole team gathered around as he boarded a cart and headed for an MRI tube.
“I’m thinking the same thing,” Daboll said. “As you watch it, he’s just slowing down. It could have happened — I’m not saying it happened — a couple of plays before where he turns when he’s running an in-cut and he’s extended. He went out there on the next play and did something. It kind of looked like a freaky accident there.”
But the NFL is unforgiving.
Shepard, 29, took a pay cut of nearly $7 million in March in order to stay with the Giants. He reportedly could have made about $2.5 million back in incentives that now will not be reached. He will enter free agency in the offseason off back-to-back season-ending injuries. He has missed 38 games over his last six seasons, and suffered multiple concussions earlier in his career.
Is it the end of his career? The end of his Giants’ tenure?
One thing that’s clear is that the Giants have tried to draft other receivers and sign big free agents in recent years, but Shepard has kept reemerging as their most reliable option. This season, he leads the team with 154 receiving yards, leads his position group with 165 snaps played and has the only touchdown catch by a receiver through three games.
Saquon Barkley, who has had similarly bad injury breaks, caught Shepard’s “look of disappointment” as he got on the cart.
“He knows we’ve all got his back going into this,” Barkley said.