There is no locker room fracture and head coach Ben McAdoo has not lost the team, so is the message and talking points from the New York Giants as they returned back from a week off.
The Giants are 1-6, a season of so much promise now heading towards likely firings and big changes. Coming off the bye week, things don’t appear to be getting much better as cornerback Janoris Jenkins is now suspended and fellow cornerback Eli Apple did not appear at practice when the team reconvened on Monday for the second half of the season.
The locker room says they’re not divided or split, even as the team seems to be slipping into some limited chaos. Keep in mind that a couple of weeks ago, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, yet another cornerback, was suspended by the team.
So that is now two team suspensions in just the span of a couple of weeks.
“Stuff happens. I don’t look at it as that. There are two different things that happened with the two suspensions that happened this year,” safety Landon Collins said. “Like I said, things happen within the organization that you have to just face and coach just has to keep his foot down. If he’s going to keep his foot down and be stern, you have to just follow the rules.”
The irony of the suspensions and issues off the field with the members of the secondary is that this wasn’t supposed to be the volatile group within the locker room. The thought all along was that the wide receiver group, featuring unique personalities in Odell Beckham Jr. and Brandon Marshall, were the morning line favorites to have a meltdown.
The suspension is another black eye in a year that is fast becoming forgettable for the Giants.
Rodgers-Cromartie said that McAdoo still has the respect of the team – “it would be haywire, a lot of chaos” if the head coach had, in fact, lost his players. As for his own suspension a couple weeks ago, Rodgers-Cromartie said that he apologized to the team and tried to move on.
“I apologized,” Rodgers-Cromartie said. “But for the most part, I just thanked them for not allowing a situation that really got out of control that really shouldn’t have even got like that not affect all of this and still go out there and play. I told them I was sorry and I’m glad to be back and all of them accepted that.”
