Giants Preparing to Hit the Road for Key Week of Training Camp

The New York Giants are getting ready to hit the road this week for a five-day trip to Detroit that will see two joint practices on Tuesday and Wednesday and then their first preseason game of 2023 against the Lions, a team they faced (and lost to) last season.

Giants head coach Brian Daboll, who was on the Dolphins coaching staff as their offensive coordinator, hired current Lions head coach (and one-time Giants tight end) Dan Campbell in 2011 to coach the team's tight ends, have a professional and personal bond that will allow their two respective teams to level up the competition this week to further aid in their assessment of their respective teams.

Joint practices have grown more popular, with the league having reduced the preseason schedule from four games to three in favor of an extra regular-season game. Although joint practices are conducted under controlled environments, they still offer a level up in competition and provide head coaches and general managers with a measuring stick regarding how their rosters are taking shape.

"I think it’s good to practice against another team," Daboll said. "You are competing against different players, so you are seeing different matchups. You are seeing where your team is relative to the other team. You are going against different schemes."

Campbell agreed.

"It’s a fresh look at somebody else, and I love that because camp – you’ve got to be careful. You get into the same routine, the rut, the mundane, and you don’t ever go," he said. "You’re just spinning your wheels, so this will be good for us."

For the Giants, who have primarily stayed at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center for training camp every year since 2013, it's also a chance for the players, coaches, and staff, who already spend hours each day in the building and on the practice field working together, to take the bonding process to another level.

"You are in a hotel together for about five days," Daboll said. "You are just around each other most of the time in the hotel. You know, you are practicing. You are around each other pretty much every day. It’s like going away for camp almost."

In the past, when the Giants would go away for training camp--they did so in every preseason since their founding in 1925, finally breaking that cycle in 2011, when the uncertainty of the lockout that year forced many teams to scrap any plans to go away for the summer--they would usually have some sort of team activity to promote bonding.

Such activities might have included renting out a movie theater or going bowling. But with such a short trip on tap for Daboll's Giants, there won't be time for any extracurricular activities as a team.

"I mean, we will be out there practicing and meeting. It’s still training camp for us. Going through the tape and doing all those things, but again instead of going home to your house, you are at the hotel," he said.

Daboll, who as a member of the Bills staff would go away to camp at St. John Fisher College, which is about 90 minutes from Buffalo, was asked if he missed going away for training camp.

"I like how we do it here--we have a great facility, so it’s been good," he said. "Fans have been great. They’ve been awesome every day. A packed house gives the guys a lot of juice. Very thankful for our fans."

Daboll has left most of the planning of the joint practices to his chief of staff, Laura Young, who has coordinated with Campbell's assistant. The Giants head coach said he planned to reach out to Campbell over the weekend to finalize specifics related to the practices and create scripts.

"It’s not much different than the practices that you have, that you script out here," Daboll said when asked about the nature of the scripts. "There is third down, there’s red zone, there is first and second down. There’s a bunch of different things; you just kind of put them together.

"Our sports science people talk to their sports science, so it’s a collective agreement in terms of how we want to approach practice, the things we want to get out of it, and practice the right way the best you can."

For Daboll, at least, how much work certain players end up getting in the two joint practices will be used to determine how many, if any, snaps they get in the preseason game on Friday night.

" We will revisit that all once we get to it, but it’s planned out relative to the practices and stuff. Who plays, how long. I’m not there yet; we’re not there yet."

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