RULE OF LAW
Joe Judge takes page from coaching legend, makes sloppy Giants restart practice
Joe Judge laced into his Giants players 20 minutes into Thursday afternoon's practice and made them start the entire practice over, from stretching on out. And wouldn't you know that Bill Cowher, the Hall of Fame former coach of the Giants' Week 1 opponent, used to do the exact same thing to light a fire under his Pittsburgh Steelers.
“I've done it a number of times. I've started drills over, I've started practices over, because there are times when you go out there to work and you just feel like the sense of focus and the sense of purpose is just not there,” Cowher, 63, CBS' NFL Today pregame show analyst, told the DailyNewsonthephoneThursday afternoon. “As a head coach you only get so many of those days and you're never gonna get that day back. And sometimes theyneedtobereminded ofthat.
“So I think for Joe Judge, he's kinda trying to set the standard being that we practice a certain way, and he's trying to change a degree of a culture there,” Cowher observed. “So I like what he's doing from that perspective. If it wasn't what he foresaw it should be, what he expects it to be, from an attention to detail, focus and effort standpoint — because you play like you practice.”
Indeed, Judge did not like the urgency, attention to detail or energy from his players during their individual period open to the media. So he gathered them all between the Giants' two main practice fields and let them have it in an expletive-laced scolding.
Thenall69oftheGiants'players (53 active roster, 16 practice squad) lined back up on Field Two and started high-stepping forward, repeating the warmup they'd done less than a half-hour prior, as the loudspeaker blared
“stretch” once again.
Judge talks to the media before his practices, so he won't explain Thursday's tirade in his own words until Friday.
But defensive captain Blake Martinez said after practice that this was the “first time” he's been forced to restart a practice in his five-year NFL career. He said it happened because “we didn't come out the right way and we needed to kind of refocus and get things going again.”
And Martinez insisted the players “took it in a positive way” and “it wasn't kind of like ‘ here we go, why are we doing this.'”
“I think we all understand how big this first week is to kind of set a statement for ourselves as a team and what we want to be moving throughout this season,” the inside linebacker added.
Willie Colon, a former Super Bowl champion with the Steelers, tipped off the Daily News on Thursday that Cowher had used thesametacticonhisteaminthe Steel City in the summer of 2006.
Colon said Cowher did this twice during his rookie Steelers training camp coming off Pittsburgh's Super Bowl in 2005, when the NFL was still doing two-a-days.
“To get through training camp was a badge of honor,” Colon told the News through text Thursday. “He started practice over when we were stinking it up. He didn't do it all the time, but he believed in practicing like a champion. They have a standard in Pittsburgh. They don't accept mediocrity.”
These examples obviously depict two different franchises at two different junctures: in 2006, Cowher was entering his 15th and final season trying to prevent a Super Bowl hangover. The Steelers would finish 8-8.
Here in 2020, Judge is in his first year as a head coach at any level, trying to completely change the Giants' operation and expectations given their NFL-worst 12-36 record the past three seasons.
What's most important is that Judge's top players buy in, though, and Saquon Barkley said on Thursday that he did — the same Barkley who ran plays with the second-team offense in a training camp scrimmage and didn't buck.
“I love it. I love it,” Barkley said of restarting practice. “That's something that we knew we were going to focus on. Everything we do is going to have purpose behind it. Coach didn't like how we started off, so we had to start over. As captains and as leaders of the team, we had to step up to the challenge and I think that we responded.
“The thing is that on Monday, there won't be any restarts,” Barkley added. “We have to find a way to have that energy and find a way to have that purpose from the beginning. It shouldn't take a restart for it to happen.”
Cowher assured that Judge deserves patience molding his team, too, because events like Thursday's are part of a process of a coach and his players communicating and understanding the new standard.
“I think both Joe Judge and his team are getting to know each other,” Cowher said. “This is the first year. The first year is a feeling out process. Joe Judge is trying to get a feel for his staff, for his football team, for all the responsibilities he has as a head coach. The players on the other side are trying to understand a new system but also what they're trying to understand is what does this coach expect from us. What is important to him? Because what's important to him needs to be more important to me. And sometimes that process, it goes through these periods of time. It doesn't happen overnight.”