Joe Judge learned a lot from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick during his eight years working in Foxboro, and his next challenge is taking that wisdom and using it to turn around a New York Giants franchise that hasn't seen playoff football since 2016.
Judge was introduced as the new head coach of the Giants on Thursday, and he highlighted an important facet of the game that he learned under Belichick.
“What I learned from coach Belichick was real simple -- be flexible within your personnel,” Judge said at his press conference. “Don’t try to shove round pegs into square holes. Figure out what you have. Let them play to their strengths. Don’t sit in a meeting and tell me what you don’t have in a player. Don’t tell me they can’t do a certain thing. Tell me what they can do, and then we’ll figure out as coaches -- because that’s our job -- how we can use that. That’s our responsibility.
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"Everybody has something they can do. How may castoffs do you see around the league that end up on another team and everyone says, ‘Wow, how’d they get that out of him?’ Maybe they were just closing their eyes to what they could do. As a coaching staff, when we get assembled, we have to make sure we’re sitting down, we’re patient with our players, we fully evaluate them, we find out what they can do to be an asset, and then we’re not foolish enough to not use that.”
Empowering his players and not asking them to do too much have always been hallmarks of Belichick's success in New England, and it sounds like Judge is trying to bring that same philosophy to the Giants.
Judge was the Patriots' special teams coordinator for the last five seasons, and in 2019 he also served as the team's wide receivers coach. He comes to the Giants with Belichick's stamp of approval, too. Belichick reportedly gave a "glowing recommendation" to the Giants on Judge, in addition to publicly praising the 38-year-old as an "excellent leader."
