Chris Snee was pretty much finished by his eighth season.
Justin Tuck was never the same after his sixth season.
Kenny Phillips was done by his fifth.
Steve Smith was toast in his fourth.
Terrell Thomas made a herculean effort to come back at all for a fourth season after not playing for two years.
I know football's a brutal game and injuries happen, but they've really had some rotten injury luck.
I am surprised Kiwi is one of the last one standing, along with Eli.
I think Tuck is underestimated slightly. He definitely wasn't the same (I want to say after the Flozell Adams cheap shot?), and I know stats aren't everything, but last year he was very good against the run and had double digit sacks.
Thomas is one of those players that, in a weird way, probably exceeded expectations given his circumstances. Every team gets a handful of players bit with multiple injuries/surgeries, but the way Thomas responded time and time again was extraordinary.
Phillips and Smith I totally agree with. Phillips was looking like he could be a top 5 safety in the NFL before his injury, and while he showed flashes after that, he just never fully recovered. Smith? He had like 25-farkin-catches in one season more than ANY GIANT EVER. His fall from grace is the craziest of them all.
O'Hara is another.
They had to recontruct his knee. For a player that was never a super athlete, and who made himself by maxing out his ability, it's a death sentence.
I thought some of his best seasons, were the later seasons of his career.
I would say bad luck on the first three, but it happens, and teams usually don't find Pro Bowl WRs in their backyard UDFA pool to wildly succeed the guy lost to a bad injury.
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NFL careers are generally short, but you'd think at least one of them, given the positional histories/probabilities, would have held up longer than they did, as they were all pretty much shot after 2010.
We've definitely had bad luck with long-term injuries. Lots of good players who didn't have anything close to the normal career arc because of long-term injuries.
All five of those lineman got paid, though Seubert did less well than the others. The players I feel most for are the ones who fell just short of a big payday because of ill-timed injuries - like Phillips, Thomas and Smith. Even Jon Goff and Dominik Hixon were on their way to nice, lucrative careers when their knees went.
Then there's Chad Jones, whose bad luck is of a different magnitude, though he still considers himself fortunate.
What do you think?
O'Hara had been hurt and missed most games in 2010, but what's new about a player being banged up one year. Shaun was about the only Giant O-Lineman to make the Pro Bowl three times, once as a starter. Seubert was BBI's player of the year, so did the BBI people here think that he was "done" going into 2011.
That line was "lunch pail" line like in 1986. No publicity, average to good ability, but playing as a unit for so many years made them special.
So in 2011, sacks go up from 16 to 28. Bradshaw rushing average goes from 4.5 to 3.9 and Jacobs from 5.6 to 3.8.
But since we won the Super Bowl by the width of a hair I wouldn't change a damn thing.
Seubert's injury in the last game of 2010 was something he just couldn't get back from and he had to call it a day. A couple teams (including Miami) showed interest in O'Hara in 2011, after the Giants cut him, but he couldn't pass a physical to be cleared to play even in the middle of that season; he too was just physically done.
The Giants have made plenty of mistakes in recent years. Cutting players that had to retire because injury is not one of them.
Seubert was singing the old "ready by training camp" song. But you could make the better case for keeping Seubert since he was 32 and didn't have a prior list of very serious injuries.
There's a hint in this article that the Giants needed cap space for Bradshaw, Steve Smith, and Bossy. So, who knows, they sign Seubert and don't sign Bossy then they lose the Super Bowl, if they even get there.
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I'm sure Reese would have loved to have been able to ride at least Seubert at C for one more year and not have had to overpay Baas like he did, but it was never an option for the team. You can't keep guys who physically can't be cleared to play and that you know very likely won't ever be again.
It is futile to argue this since we don't his exact medical condition, or what his doctors were telling the Giants.