| E-GIANTS
Dave Klein was the Giants' beat
writer for The Star-Ledger from 1961 to 1995.
He is the author of 26 books
and he is one of only three sportswriters to have covered all the Super Bowls.
Dave has allowed TEAM GIANTS to reprint some of his articles.
THERE IS NO EASY SCHEDULE FOR THE 2020 GIANTS - WHO WILL OPEN AND CLOSE AT HOME
By Dave Klein
Finally,
despite the pandemic and predictions that the NFL schedule would be shortened,
delayed, cancelled or otherwise tinkered with, we know when the Giants will play
their 2020 opponents.
We already knew who they would be facing the day the
2019 season came to an end, but this puts an official stamp of finality on it.
Assuming, of course, there is a season ... partial or delayed or cancelled.
It is no easy timetable for the Giants, who have won the grand total of 12 games
over the last three seasons - an average of four per year. In that time span there
have been two head coaches - Ben McAdoo and Pat Shurmur - and now Joe Judge gets
his first chance to right the ship.
They open with a Monday night game, have
another later in the season - immediately following a Thursday night game, also
at home - and get to play, among others, teams with Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady
and Jimmy Garappolo, quarterbacks they didn't have to face last year.
"I'll
tell you what, when you get the schedule, it definitely does give you a little
surge of energy,” Judge said. "It stimulates a lot of conversation between
all areas of the organization - the support staff and the coaching staff -- and
you start preparing immediately for it.
"The number one positive is we're
getting ready to play football. That's the biggest thing. Once you get the schedule,
it starts moving a little bit faster in your mind in terms of preparing for what's
in front of you. The thing we were waiting to see a little bit on was how some
of the cross-country games played out.
"That ties in a little bit to
how you plan out a lot of your travel for the year, which is tied to how you practice
those weeks. You start mapping out how you're going to go about each week by week
through the season.
"We can start working on hotels and you start having
more conversations that are going to tie into how you're going to plan and prepare
throughout the flow of the season. You look at the bye week, you look at how shortly
before that is the Thursday night game, which leads into a Monday night game.
"How can you use some of the breaks in the season to help your players?
How can we structure practice accordingly? You're also tying in the new rules
with our limited number of padded practices. You just start calculating as you
look on down the list of opponents."
THE 2020 SCHEDULE --- Sept. 14, Pittsburgh
7 p.m. (Monday night); 20, at Chicago, 1 p.m.; San Francisco. 1 p.m.
--- Oct. 4, at L.A. Rams, 4:05 p.m.; 11, at Dallas, 4:25 p.m.; 18, Washington,
1 p.m.; 22 (Thursday night), at Philadelphia, 8:20 p.m.
--- Nov. 2 (Monday night), Tampa Bay, 8:15 p.m.; at Washington, 1 p.m.; 15, Philadelphia,
1 p.m.; 22 - BYE; 29, at Cincinnati, 1 p.m.
--- Dec. 6, at Seattle, 4:05 p.m.; 13, Arizona, 1 p.m.; 20, Cleveland, 1 p.m.;
27, at Baltimore, 1 p.m. --- Jan. 3,
Dallas, 1 p.m. The four preseason games
also were finalized. They will be played (dates and times to be determined) against
the New York Jets, at Tennessee, Green Bay and New England.
For only the third time in the last seven seasons, the Giants won't be opening
in Dallas. Check
out Dave's website at E-GIANTS
where you can subscribe to his newsletters which
run much more frequently than what is available here.
- Team Giants
NOW
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