It's not magic, it's science! How the Giants, Jets have remained injury-free

There may not be enough forests, lumber yards or cabinet stores in the metropolitan area for the Giants and Jets to knock on all of the wood they’ll feel they have to after seeing this article.

When he was asked about the topic this past week, Jets coach Robert Saleh began furiously rapping on the lectern behind which he stood, and that’s just made of particle board.

Superstitions and possibly jinxes aside, something rare and amazing has happened for the two teams this preseason.

They have gotten through a combined seven exhibition games, nearly 50 practices, dozens of walk-throughs and thousands of drilled reps without one major injury to a player projected to be at or near the top of their depth charts.

Both teams are as healthy as they could possibly dream of being as they head into the regular season. In fact, not only have they not lost anyone to a debilitating season-ending issue or even one that will nag them through the coming months, they actually managed to bring several key contributors along to the point of being ready to go.

Mekhi Becton will be starting at right tackle in Week 1 for the Jets and Sterling Shepard and Wan’Dale Robinson figure to be catching passes for the Giants against the Cowboys in the opener on the night of Sept. 10.

It’s not luck.

It’s no accident, either.

If you ask Saleh and Brian Daboll, they’ll tell you it’s science. Sports science, to be exact.

As much as talent and coaching, injuries at key positions usually are among the biggest factors in deciding playoff teams and the eventual Super Bowl champ each year. Injuries are the most fretted about and vexing resistance to goals, and for most of football history, they have been treated like the proverbial weather: Everybody talks about them but nobody does anything about it.

That’s starting to change.

The Giants and the Jets are among the many teams in the NFL who have invested dollars and manpower hours into studying when, how and why injuries spring up that derail seasons before they ever start, then worked backward in an effort to avoid them.

And what do you know? It seems to be working.

“We’ve changed a bunch,” Daboll said this past week, a year after the Giants lost half their rookie draft class and at least two projected starters to season-ending knee injuries. “Schedules, times [for practices], sleep, rest time, breaks in practice, longer periods at some stuff, shorter on other stuff, longer periods at the end. There’s a ton of stuff that those guys have really dug into and done a good job.”

The Jets have taken a similar path toward enlightening their staff and keeping their training room as empty as possible.

“I think over the last three years, we’ve done an awesome job collaborating and communicating throughout the organization,” Saleh said. “You’re never in the clear, you’re always trying to study it to make sure we’re in good shape in terms of where we are as a team.”

Some of the advice they get goes against the long-held instincts of the profession.

“Always as a coaching staff you are pushing the envelope, but they’re always kicking back trying to move the envelope back,” Saleh said. “You just keep pushing it, but at the same time, you have to be smart.”

Said Daboll: “I give input and I don’t always agree with it. As a coach, you want them to be out there [on the field] all the time. But they certainly had a well-thought-out process, very detailed, and did a really good job with it.”

It’s not just the coaches who were wary of the medical advice, either. Players, too, want to play. But the results of this summer have won them over.

“They held me back, but it was all for the greater good of my health,” Shepard said of his prescheduled days off throughout the past month. “I felt like it helped a lot. I was able to go out there and play at the max. I don’t know if it would have been like that if I was pounding every day coming back from the ACL and Achilles. Two major injuries back-to-back.

“I felt like it was a good plan . . . I feel like I’m past the day-on, day-off stage, but at the end of the day, it’s whatever they want me to do and whatever they think is best.”

When it came to mapping out their plans, the Giants began at a very significant date on their schedule. Not the opener against the Cowboys, but their Week 3 game against the 49ers.

That’ll be a Thursday night contest and the Giants’ third game in a span of 12 days. Their goal was to have as many players as possible healthy for that game in San Francisco, and from there, they moved backward to the start of training camp mapping out everyone’s reps and mileage (yes, mileage, which is counted via the GPS trackers that the players wear on their pads).

Not all of the plotting worked perfectly, however. The Jets were saddled with an extra preseason contest and had to navigate the extra hazards that came with it. That’s not only 33% more preseason games than 30 other teams, but the timing of that Hall of Fame Game in Canton.

“I’ll argue from a coach’s standpoint we’re not ready to play a game yet,” Saleh groused. “And so we go out and play a game.”

They did themselves no favors on the field in that appearance, either. In the second quarter, linebacker Bryce Huff was lined up offsides with the starting defense, which extended a Browns possession.

“And now we go from a four-play drive to a 10-play drive,” Saleh said.

That may not seem like a lot, just six more plays, but from a finely calculated workload perspective, it was six more exposures to potential soft-tissue injuries.

“There’s a balance and there’s an understanding of, like, how far do you want to push the guys, because there’s still a callous involved in our mind,” Saleh said. “As a coach, you want to callous them and get them ready to play a season, but from a player standpoint, you want to make sure they’re available to callous, so there’s a tremendous balance to it.”

Football is a collision sport with inherent risks. Minimizing them sometimes requires a degree of fortune.

When Jets rookie running back Izzy Abanikanda had to be helped off the field with an apparent knee injury against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers two weeks ago, it sure seemed as if the new MetLife Stadium turf — a replacement for a surface that had a reputation, unfair or not, for causing injuries — had claimed its first ACL. Even Saleh on the sideline was fretting about that outcome as the 20-year-old kid limped off the field.

Nope. It was just a contusion and Abanikanda was back practicing this week.

And it wasn’t the lack of a specialized plan that led to Giants linebacker Kayvon Thibodeaux suffering a knee sprain while receiving an illegal chop block in his preseason debut a year ago. That injury hovered over him most of his rookie season. This year he, like most of his teammates, is going into the opener at the peak of health.

The Jets finished the preseason with a 2-2 record. The Giants were 1-2. Their starting offenses played a total of three combined series and scored two combined touchdowns.

It’s impossible to say what any of it means from a purely football perspective.

But as far as remaining healthy, and that’s really the main objective for every team in this annual August gantlet, the two teams just completed what may be their greatest preseasons ever.

“One of the first checkpoints [or the season] is getting through training camp, having a productive training camp and staying healthy,” Jets general manager Joe Douglas said. “We’ve been able to do that.”

Now comes the big question: Will the Jets’ and Giants’ avoidance of injuries continue into the regular season?

Go ahead and knock on that wood some more.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.