Joe Schoen: Giants will ‘turn over every leaf’ to address injury issues

Giants GM Joe Schoen said he is going to “turn over every leaf” to figure out why his 2022 team sustained so many injuries.

The Giants were the NFL’s sixth most injured team in the regular season, losing 261 games due to injury or health protocols, according to ManGamesLost.com.

“We’re working through that,” Schoen said Monday. “Specifically the rookie class. Was it young players coming in in the onboarding process? Are we doing that right? We’re gonna turn over every leaf to figure that out. Because healthy players give us the best chance to win.

“We had some ACLs this year, we had some MCLs, stingers,” the GM added. “So we’ll do a deep dive in the offseason and do whatever we can to improve that to be as healthy as we can.”

Schoen was focused specifically on his 11-man rookie draft class. Ten of the 11 players missed time due to injury, including four torn ACLs: second-round WR Wan’Dale Robinson, fifth-rounder DT D.J. Davidson and OT Marcus McKethan, and seventh-round LB Darrian Beavers.

“I think they all got injured except [fifth-round linebacker Micah] McFadden at some point,” Schoen said.

It wasn’t just the rookies, though. Other significant injuries included: WR Kadarius Toney (pre-trade), WR Sterling Shepard, DL Leonard Williams, CB Adoree Jackson, OLB Azeez Ojulari, CB Aaron Robinson, WR Collin Johnson, DL Nick Williams and OLB Elerson Smith.

The Giants, in reality, have been one of the NFL’s most injured teams annually for a long time despite frequently turning over coaching staffs.

They ranked dead last in the league at 32nd overall from 2013-15 under Tom Coughlin in Football Outsiders’ Adjusted Games Lost metric. And they ranked 25th in 2017 (Ben McAdoo), 23rd in 2020 (Joe Judge) and 27th in 2021 (Joe Judge).

They failed to sustain improvements to eighth in 2016 (McAdoo) and 2018 (Pat Shurmur), and were middle of the road 16th in 2019 (Shurmur).

So Schoen must examine everything, including the team’s reduced training camp and practice workload under first-year head coach Brian Daboll, a plan that was created in collaboration with longtime head trainer Ronnie Barnes and the training staff.