Giants Counting on Harbaugh’s Approach to Yield a Fast Start to Season

New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh has a way of doing things that, for the first 18 years of his head coaching career, has mostly yielded success.

He’s 12-6 in Week 1 regular-season openers, a record achieved in part thanks to a strategic camp and preseason strategy in which he has taken full advantage of every practice provision allowed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), right down to the maximum amount of time a practice is allowed to be held each day.

He has also been judicious in how he’s distributed preseason snaps, holding out players he feels have little to gain from the extra work and instead choosing to get those players ready in the controlled environment of practice.

This is the same strategy Harbaugh has deployed in his first season with the Giants. He worked the team throughout training camp in blocks of time, only giving them a day off when it was truly mandated. Every practice, including the walk-throughs or what he termed “mental days,” was conducted at a brisk pace.

All of that was designed to strike a balance between getting the players ready for what will hopefully be a long season topped with a long postseason while not exposing them to the harms that come with taking live reps.

It’s similar in philosophy to what Harbaugh’s predecessor, Brian Daboll, believed, with one exception. Daboll didn’t run anything close to as stringent a training camp as what Harbaugh ran.

Practices rarely went the allotted distance, and he followed a three-days-on, one-day-off pattern last summer, which players like tight end Isaiah Likely, who was with Harbaugh for the first four years of his career, found surprising.

“I feel like that's normal to me,” Likely said of the Giants’ training camp practice pace in the first two weeks, in which they worked 10 out of the first 11 days. “If I wake up, I'm putting on cleats. That's just the mantra I have.

“So, hearing how Giants training camp was in the past, that was kind of mind-boggling to me, but I feel like the guys embraced it.”

Outside linebacker Brian Burns agreed, noting that Harbaugh’s approach has put the team closer to being ready to hit the ground running in Week 1.

“I ain't gonna lie, if we didn't practice as hard as we do, I don't know if we would have made it through this heat,” he said after the team completed a joint practice with the Miami Dolphins in South Florida’s sweltering conditions.

“I feel like us practicing as hard as we do definitely prepared us for all of this. …

I definitely think we're going to be ready to go (in Week 1).”

Giants Need a Fast Start

Fast starts have been hard to come by for the Giants. Beginning in 2016, the first year of the post-Tom Coughlin era, the Giants are 2-8 in regular season openers.

In the two seasons in which they began with a Week 1 win (2016 and 2022), the Giants went to the postseason.

While one game doesn’t always set the tone for a team’s outcome—plenty of teams have started 0-1 only to go on and reach the postseason—for a team like the Giants, which has struggled to find its identity and establish a winning culture, what they end up doing in Week 1 and over the course of the next several weeks thereafter usually goes a long way toward establishing what kind of season is in store.

The Giants, this year, have a chance to snap out of their annual funk. While their first two games (against the Cowboys and Rams) are not going to be easy, New York then has a four-game stretch against the Titans, Cardinals, Commanders and Saints—all teams that did not make the postseason last year and who have their own questions that may or may not yet be answered.

In short, it’s a golden opportunity for the Giants to potentially go 5-1 in their first six games, with their seventh game coming on the road against a very strong Houston Texans team before they hit their bye week .

A 5-2 record for the Giants at the bye would be a significant step forward for the Giants, who face a more challenging second half of their schedule, with three of their last five on the road, including back-to-back games at Detroit on Monday night and the Cowboys six days later.

There’s plenty of reason to be optimistic about the Giants having a better season than they have since their last postseason berth in 2022. They have to go out there and continue to prove that their head coach’s strategy is still valid.

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