ESPN SC | Ryan Clark reacts to Shocking Blow for Giants: Cam Skattebo Injured, Ruled Out of Action!

ESPN SC | Ryan Clark reacts to Shocking Blow for Giants: Cam Skattebo Injured, Ruled Out of Action!

Cam Scataboo was carded off the field after apparently suffering a serious ankle injury. Scataboo went down in the second quarter against the Eagles. He took a hit over the middle on a pass attempt and his ankle appeared twisted, leaving quarterback Jackson Dart and others visibly disturbed. Earlier in the game, Scataboo caught an 18-yd touchdown pass, his fourth touchdown versus Philadelphia this season. All right, let’s bring on Damen Harris to uh react to this news here of Cam Scataboo. Obviously, a guy that’s almost like the heart and soul of this offense. He himself is fun to watch, not just on the football field, but as a character. How much does he mean to this Giants offense? Well, he means everything, but first and foremost, you have to ask the question, what does Cam Scatteraboo mean to his family? what does he mean to the people around him that love him and cherish him and watch him go and put himself uh in the field of danger for the sake of winning a football game every week? That’s where my attention immediately goes through goes to um unfortunately I dealt with something similar where I had to be carded off and I tell you in those milliseconds that it seemed like were passing by all I thought about was my wife. She was pregnant at the time. I was thinking about my family that was in attendance. So yes, as much as Cam Scatteraboo means to the New York Giants, to the locker room, to the organization, he’s a human being. He’s a person. And to see anybody go through a situation like that where they’re packed into an ambulance, taken to the hospital, that’s just not what you want to see. So from human to human, from person to person, brother to brother that played in the NFL fraternity, I just think about him, his family, and I’m just praying for him for a speedy recovery. I’m praying for the comfort of his loved ones and just that this will be a part of his testimony moving forward and a part of what ultimately he becomes. Yeah, it’s so tough to see those injuries happen and and I mentioned it in that read too. Giants players visibly just disturbed by seeing that. Not just for what he meant, but you know, it’s the fraternity if you know what it’s like. If injury hasn’t happened to you yet, chances are it’s going to eventually uh because the injury risk in the NFL is is 100%. You also know the cold hard facts of they still have to continue to play this football game. and they have to continue to play the rest of the season. What does taking Cam Scatteraboo out of that lineup do for this Giants offense? It takes away your edge. It takes away the toughness. It takes away the mantra essentially that they’ve built in New York around not only him but Jackson Dart. And why do I bring Jackson Dart into this conversation? Because as we’ve seen it, him and Cam Scataboo, they’re stepbros. They’re best friends. They feed off of each other’s energy. The way that they communicate, the way that when one of them makes a big play, the other one gets going and makes another big play and they feed off of each other. the joy that they’re bringing the fans. I mean, you can’t replic rep replicate what Cam Scataboo has already done. And again, we’re talking about a rookie here. So, that speaks to the volumes of the player that he is, um, the leader that he is. I mean, we saw him do this at Arizona State. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen. So such a huge huge hit to not only the New York Giants, but you got to think about for Brian Debball, too, as somebody who’s trying to keep his job, somebody who’s hanging his job security on the heads of two rookies who, you know, have so far saved him. But when you’re missing one piece of the puzzle, it’s hard to have a complete picture. So again, you can’t understate the loss of Cam Scataboo, but this is going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on Jackson Dart. And some people can see that as a negative, but we all know no pressure, no diamonds. This is not the first major player to go down too. Jackson Dart also losing Malik Neighbors a few weeks ago, so we’ve seen him have to be resilient. What do you think about his ability to overcome the loss of now Cam Scataboo, at least in the interim today? Well, we’re going to find out. I mean, it’s hard to say because again, you lose Malik Neighbors, you’re still playing with a lot of confidence, you’re still going out there, you’re having fun, but again, that relational piece. I can’t say that he had the same relationship with Malik Neighbors that we’ve obviously seen with him and Cam Scataboo. So, whenever you lose your guys, like I’ve been a part of teams where we lose an important guy. And not only are we missing his talent, what he brings to the field, but we’re missing his voice, we’re missing his presence, we’re missing his energy. And you know, we think to ourselves, man, are we going to be the same team without this guy? Again, not just because of his physical attributes, but just the the the feeling that he brings to our team and our culture. And that’s going to be exactly what the New York Giants are feeling right now. And again, all eyes are going to be on Jackson Dart. I mean, it may, as unfortunate as it may be, that’s what being quarterback in the National Football League looks like. Like he’s going to have to find a way. him, Brian Dball, this defense that has a ton of stars on the other side of the ball. They’re just going to have to find a way to pull themselves together, get their morale up, and just keep putting together positive performances so they can keep winning. Want to present one seven to seven, fourth down and a yard. We know what’s coming. The tush push not stopped, but the ball ripped out of the hands of Jaylen Herz. Take me through JJ the difficulty in officiating officiating this play and specifically this moment here. I think we just saw the death of the tush push. I now look, they’re going to allow teams to continue doing the push sneak play for the rest of the season, but in the off season that I have no doubt in my mind that NFL team owners are going to vote this play out. It was it was two votes shy back in May. And Jeffrey Luri, the owner of the Eagles and Jason Kelsey, they gave this big impassion speech at an owner meeting. Ultimately, it fell two votes shy. It will not fall two votes shy when they bring this up at the annual meetings in March. It will be voted out because what we have seen is last year they said, “All right, the injury rate, we’re worried about guys getting injured.” Injury rate was at zero last year. Well, now we started to see injuries on the push play. So, there’s that. Uh we have seen so many missed false starts. We didn’t have one today, but we’ve seen guys go early and it’s not called. And officials say it’s really hard seeing that mass of bodies. and who goes early in a bang bang play without the benefit of slow motion. And so now we’ve seen that and now what is clearly a fumble? Clearly a fumble and wasn’t an early whistle. I’m not going to fault the referees actually for blowing the whistle because you have to protect players from getting absolutely blasted by defensive players coming in there uh late in the play. So I understand the idea of a whistle. This is clearly Jaylen Herds attempting to get more yardage to convert and Kavon Tibido making a football play on what a lot of people believe is not a football play. The tush push is in its last season and it just died because of that. Even in a situation where you’re protecting players, your occupational hazard in this play is deciding to call it. M how do you as a former player look at this when we’re waiting for a player to make a play, hoping for someone to show us how to stop it? We see it and it’s stopped by the referees. That’s the unfair part about this. Kavon Thibido made a great play because of the effort that Jaylen Herz was trying to display. Like you said, he was trying to make sure he sec secure the conver conversion. So he put the football out. No different than doing it across the goal line. Because if this was a goal line play, would they have said, you know what, his forward progress stopped. No touchdown. No, they would have rewarded the Eagles with a touchdown. So, this should be the same mindset in between the 20s because you can say whatever you want to say about it happening in the first quarter. There was still many opportunities for the Giants to come get over that call and still win the ball game. It’s about momentum. It’s about momentum. The momentum would have clearly shift in favor of the Giants if they were was rewarded that fumble. But outside of that, because they took the play away, two or three plays later, guess what happened? They scored a touchdown. You talk about a potential 14-point swing if that turnovers turnover was rewarded to the Giants and they go down and score. But because that didn’t happen, guess what? The Eagles score and that started that snowball coming downhill and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I agree with everything you said because if the officials have issues officiating the play, the play should not be in the game. That’s right. And not only that, Mac, I take it a step further. When running backs have the ball and they in the pal, what they allow people to do? Push. push the power forward. That’s exactly what was happening on that play. The forward progress has never stopped. And on top of that, Jaylen thought he was short, so that’s why he stuck the ball out. And Tibido did a great job of raking the ball out of there. That was a fumble. No doubt about it. I I I agree with everyone on this table. The play should be taken out because the refs don’t understand or don’t know how to officiate the play. False starts almost each and every week. None today. But that clearly, that play right there clearly was a fumble that was taken away from the Giants. We’ve seen moments that will be brought to the table when that vote does come down. This feels like the straw that should break the camel’s back in terms of getting this play out of the NFL. It’s a tough one to watch, but we did have a football game from that point on. And in the end, 15 to 20, 179, and four touchdown passes for Jaylen Herz. You have a running back that goes for 150 on 10 per pop in Saquon Barkley. The Eagles for a second consecutive week. M looking like the defending champs. Yeah, the Eagles offensively throwing the football. second straight week where Jaylen Herz was wheeling and dealing. Now Saquon Barkley decided to say, “You know what? Y’all ain’t about to have no fun without me. Let me show you guys. I got a twostep left also.” And he got involved. Now we saw him pull up a little bit lame in the fourth quarter. To your point, JJ, they have him by week. So we have an opportunity to see a a weeks of rest for Saquon. But this is what we visualize this offense looking like in a day where they did not have AJ Brown. He didn’t miss AJ Brown. So Saquon Barkley was outstanding. 150. You talked about the four passing touchdowns from Jayen Herz. I mean, when they’re rolling and moving around like this, this is a championship caliber team and this is what we expect to see from this offense moving forward. Y Pat, when we’re talking about a guy like Cam Scataboo and where the New York Giants currently are. You’ve been in locker rooms that are struggling to get it going or bring a group together and so much of their identity was in the quarterback and in the running back. What does this loss mean to the Giants? That’s a it’s a huge loss for this New York uh the the Gmen. This is a huge loss for them because ever since these guys was inserted into the lineup, they just brought new energy, new hope, new fire, and the team was galvanizing around that around that. You just saw how excited the team was to be out on the field and now missing one of their two-headed, you know, spark plugs. Um, it’s going to be difficult for the Jets moving forward, but, you know, Scataboo, he definitely was the the bloodline uh for this for this Jets uh the Giants team. Let’s see if they can have a call call upon someone else to pick up his load. It’s going to be difficult because this is also a Giants team now two and six, right? And they have the ners coming up after this, right before the trade deadline. And so we were talking a week and a half ago about the Giants potentially being buyers at the trade deadline. They they may be sellers at the trade deadline. They had Jaylen Hyatt as a healthy scratch today. There may be other pieces that teams are looking around at the Giants for because I don’t know that they’ll do anything this week. But if they go into the Niners game next week and lose that and turn into two and seven, they very well may be selling off some pieces looking ahead to 2026. It’s been a tough stretch since that first win over the Eagles. A loss and then another and a loss within that loss. Cam Scataboo with a dislocated ankle will miss the remainder of the season. 150 plus a touchdown and a receiving touchdown in a game. Well, Saquon and Saquon didn’t have to jump over anyone backwards in this one,