The pads came on for the first time Saturday at Camp Shurmur.
“You’ll definitely have to embrace the thud,” running back Jonathan Stewart said before practice at East “Thuderford.”
So it was time for Saquon Barkley to embrace the thud.
“Real football,” Eli Apple said. “Now it’s gonna be a lot more thumping, a lot more talking, it’s gonna be a lot more energy.”
This was the official beginnings of the transformation of the Giants into the kind of bully-ball team Dave Gettleman craves, the kind of heavy-handed team former coach Ben McAdoo never could give New York.