Recently, I was listening to Sirius XM NFL Radio while driving to New York Giants practice. The host of the show (I see you, Bob Papa) was basically doing play-by-play of the fights breaking out during a joint practice between the New York Jets and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
I relay that story because fights seem to be commonplace during these joint practices, and the Giants are participating in one with the Miami Dolphins on Thursday in Miami.
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Joint practices, of course, are not the controlled situations teams can create for their players during normal practices.
Rules of engagement
With that in mind, I asked Giants head coach John Harbaugh, a veteran of many of these situations, if there was a way a head coach could try to keep his players safe during a situation where he isn’t in charge of every player on the field.
Welcome to the ‘Rules of Engagement’.
“We’ll have rules of engagement, we’ll call it,” Harbaugh said. “Talked to Coach Hafley. He talks to his team. We talk to our team. We have the same rules of engagement.”
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Harbaugh said those rules will include, and probably emphasize, that defenders getting anywhere the opposing quarterback is strictly verboten.
“It’ll be the same that we use in our practice. It’ll be probably more to the quarterback,” Harbaugh said. “We’ll emphasize protecting each other’s quarterbacks even more, because as soon as somebody gets close, and the other team’s going to talk about getting close, and we can’t have that, nobody can get close to the quarterback. That’s going to be a major point of emphasis.”
There will be other rules of engagement.
“We’re going to stay off the ground, and we’re going to be looking for no blindside shots of any kind. We’re not looking for that,” Harbaugh said.” It’s a front-up tackle. That’s kind of a front-up type of thud, wrap you can do, but it won’t be side shots and things like that. That’s the goal.
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“So, we want to protect them as much as we protect our own players, and we want them to protect our players as much as they would protect their own players.”
What the Giants aim to accomplish
This will be a single practice in advance of Saturday’s preseason game. What is Harbaugh’s goal?
“I’m looking to get a good practice against a different team,” Harbaugh said. “You get an opportunity to go against different players, different schemes, and evaluate your guys along those lines. It’s good. It’s just nice to see a different format, different plays, different players.
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“And it’s fun. It’s more interesting. It’s not another practice day for the guys. They’re going against a new team.”
Malik Nabers won’t participate
Nabers, on the comeback trail from a pair of surgeries to repair a torn ACL, just began participating in a handful of team drills this week. He has been wearing a red, non-contact jersey.
Nabers will travel with the Giants to Miami, but won’t take part in team drills on Thursday or play in Saturday’s preseason game.
The Giants want to get Nabers involved in some degree of physicality in a controlled practice setting before exposing him to defenders on other teams.
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“He won’t go through the rest of the summer in a red jersey,” Harbaugh said. “No, he’ll be out of a red jersey before he plays in a game. He’s going to have to get bumped around and hit and fronted up so he knows how to, you just have to feel that and know how to deal with it to protect yourself.”
That just isn’t going to happen in Miami.
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