Winning close games is main area of focus
Young and old alike must learn how to achieve favorable results
CINCINNATI — Pat Shurmur and his staff are coaching the Giants’ young roster hard this summer. They continued drilling fundamentals, technique and assignments ahead of Thursday night’s third preseason game against the Bengals.
But there is one critical element of football a coach can’t teach as easily in the preseason, when hitting is limited and the games don’t count: how to win.
For these Giants, that’s no small lesson. It’s a young team — eight of their 22 projected starters are in their rookie or second season — and last year’s team shot itself in the foot repeatedly. The offense and defense teamed up to blow leads in losses to the Jaguars, Panthers and Falcons in the first half of the season and to the Eagles, Colts, and Cowboys in the second.
So how can Shurmur even teach a player how to win in August, when none of these games matter?
“We practice it and talk about it all the time,” Shurmur said recently. “As you get near the end of practice, you talk about, ‘OK, now it’s time to finish, so let’s make sure the execution is good.’
“I think you also bring in players that have done it before, so you have more guys on your roster that are aware of what that process entails. Then you put the ball down and you play. That’s where we’re at.”
Starting left tackle Nate Solder, 31, a two-time Super Bowl winner with the New England Patriots, acknowledged it’s not always easy for a player to feel confident about winning in tight moments until he does it for real. But he offers less experienced teammates this advice.
“You’ve got to have the resolve to not lose your composure when games get really tough,” he said. “There are going to be so many times in any season where the winning team just kind of persevered through and made plays when they needed to. So I think that’s the biggest thing: being ready for those opportunities, not being intimidated by those opportunities and being able to execute when it’s all on the line.”
No knows feels more urgency than Shurmur to start winning immediately, of course, but he’s juggling more than just getting this team over the hump in close games. The roster has turned over so much after general manager Dave Gettleman got it terribly wrong last year that Shurmur needs to play and test everybody simply to determine who belongs on his 53-man roster.
“We have a lot of young guys,” Shurmur said. “We have to see if they can take it from the meeting room to the practice field and then play hard out here with emotion.”
The march to more wins in 2019, then, is necessarily detail-driven.
Defensive coordinator James Bettcher harshly corrected linebacker Ryan Connelly one day this week in practice, pushing the fifth-rounder to be ready for an increasingly important role.
Defensive backs coach Everett Withers walked out into the middle of the field during a red-zone drill and explained proper leverage to one of his corners after a completion.
Shurmur himself rushed rookie quarterback Daniel Jones in an isolated drill and put his hands up, seemingly to give him a target to throw over into the flat.
The reality, though, is that the Giants need to prepare their whole roster for big moments, and many of them haven’t experienced the level of pressure they’re about to face.
“It’s a focus,” Solder said. “It’s an intensity that you go about your business every day. But this is such a great team sport. It’s so wonderful, the fact that it takes all of us.
“So just because you have one or two guys that have been there before, it’s about the whole group being in that same mentality that, ‘Hey, we can get this done no matter what the circumstances are.’ ”