Brawls break out at Giants training camp involving players, OL coach

It's a new year with a new head coach for the New York Giants, but that hasn't stopped things from unraveling at training camp. Several Giants beat writers tweeted on Monday that several brawls broke out at training camp over some overly physical plays. It apparently started with running back Saquon Barkley lowering his shoulder on cornerback Aaron Robinson, and escalated from there. Heads were grabbed, (sucker) punches were thrown and a coach even got involved in the melee.

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Brawl timeline

Here's a rough timeline of what happened, pieced together from the tweets of Dan Duggan of The Athletic, Jordan Raanan of ESPN, and Pat Leonard of the New York Daily News. On the play right after Barkley lowered his shoulder on Robinson, linebacker Tae Crowder tackled running back Antonio Williams, which did not go over well and appeared to cause a brief scuffle. In response to that, center Jon Feliciano grabbed Crowder's head on the next play and tried to "knee him in the face, WWE style," according to Leonard.

That's when things got out of hand. A crowd formed, and outside linebacker Cam Brown dragged Feliciano away from the fight.

We don't know if Brown was dragging Feliciano away to stop the fight or to start a fight with Feliciano himself, but he paid for it either way. After he dragged Feliciano away, offensive line coach Bobby Johnson shoved Brown. It gets a little hazy after that, with Feliciano and Brown either throwing punches at each other or Feliciano sucker punching Brown (or possibly both).

Videos of the brawls appeared on Twitter shortly after.

Not a good day on all fronts

This day of fights came less than a week after another fight at training camp. Despite linebacker Jihad Ward giving the press the obligatory "those fights meant nothing" spiel, things do not seem to be going great for the Giants right now.

In reality, Ward is probably right. It's still early in training camp, the players are all working with a new coach, and some of them are working with each other for the very first time. It's not a great sign that they are fighting and literally throwing punches at each other instead of saying something like "Hey, you went kind of hard on that last play, please knock it off." But even stuff like that can be worked through.

But the fighting wasn't the only concern on Monday. The offense was, as Pat Leonard of the New York Daily News put it, "a disaster." Quarterback Daniel Jones struggled, and he wasn't the only one.

Just like with the brawls, it's still early in training camp. Things could improve. But that's really not what anyone wants to see out of their QB1 just 34 days before the first game of the season.