The New York Giants held the first padded practice of their 2026 training camp in a driving rainstorm in West Virginia on Monday afternoon.
The result was a slopfest that saw 14 penalties committed and the defense dominating the offense once again.
“I think two things,” head coach John Harbaugh said when asked about his frustration level with the penalties. “I mean, I think you’ve got the elements a little bit, and you’ve got the first day in pads. So, it’s not really unexpected, but we’ll be working on it.”
Some other observations regarding the elements:
“Rough day for the Giants offense in the pouring rain on the first day with full pads,” ESPN’s Jordan Raanan wrote on his X feed. “Ridiculous number of penalties, struggle to gain yards, and one ball slipped out of Jaxson Dart’s hand as he was throwing that resulted in an easy Jevon Holland INT…Couldn’t get anything going today.”
“I mean, it happens. I think that guys are just real jittery on day one of full pads,” right tackle Jermaine Eluemunor explained in his post-practice presser. “We’ve been working so hard since April, or April 7 I think we came in, so we’ve been going since April 7. And when you put pads on, you get that, you start feeling like a little kid again. And I think that tomorrow or the next day or the next day after that, you’ll see that go down tremendously because guys will just really lock in and the pre-first full padded day jitters are gone now. Now we’re in this thing and I think guys are going to lock in to the pre-snap alignments and pre-snap cadences and all that stuff and be good to go tomorrow.”
The defense paid a price for their pre-snap penalties, according to Duggan:
“(Defensive coordinator) Dennard Wilson makes the defense do 10 pushups per penalty after practice. (Nose tackle) DJ Reader said they had four penalties today, so 40 pushups. Offensive players are typically subbed out for a play for a pre-snap penalty.”
“We do push-ups with penalties,” Reader said after practice. “We had four, but we’ve got to work out a system here. I think we need to — we get a turnover to get those 10 back. We’ve got 10 every penalty, so we had four today. A couple of cost-of-doing-business penalties, they happen. So, we had four. We had a pick today, so I thought we should have had 30. We had two, we should have had 20. But we had 40, so it was a tough first day on the push-ups.”
“They have their rules of engagement. You could ask Dennard about them, but he’s got his reasons for doing push-ups,” said Harbaugh. “You know the thing that bothers me about their push-ups? They don’t go all the way up. You go all the way down, touch your chest on the ground, and you go all the way up and extend. But they kind of do this little, short push-up thing.”
This article originally appeared on Giants Wire: New York Giants training camp: Ridiculous number of penalties on Day 5
Reporting by John Fennelly, Giants Wire / Giants Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By John Fennelly, Giants Wire | USA TODAY Network
