Giants' Logan Ryan sees the positive in training camp brawl: 'I’ll take a team like that every single day'

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – The brawl started with a series of hits, one after the other, and at first they weren’t particularly violent. The explosion came when safety Logan Ryan hammered tight end Evan Engram from behind, retaliating against him for retaliating for a late hit on running back Corey Clement.

That’s when the real violence started and 80-plus players converged.

So when it was over, after a livid Joe Judge ran his players into the ground as punishment for the wild training camp brawl, and after they went back into the locker room, what did Ryan say to Engram?

Said Ryan: “What do you want to eat for lunch?”

That’s the way it goes with training camp brawls, which are as much a part of summer as ice cream, tans and the beach. As the heat rises and the pads go on, tempers flare and the fists come out. The only novelty about the one that disrupted Giants camp on Tuesday was it was a bit wilder than most.

But the beauty of these brawls is there’s rarely a rematch and the anger almost never carries off the field. So as ugly as this was, as violent as it looked, and as mad as everyone seemed, the truth is a brawl like this is much more likely to bring the Giants together than it is to tear the locker room apart.

“Football is a great sport because even when you take some blows it brings us together as a family,” Clement said. “It doesn’t carry over. We all understand the nature of the game. You get hit, you’ve got to get right back up. If you don’t want to be a part of it, you can’t cry about it.”

“We’re great, man,” Ryan added. “It’s football. It’s a physical sport. If you’re not tough or chippy I don’t know if you can play this game. Me, Evan, we’re locker buddies. We’ll be fine. This is a football team. Practice gets physical and chippy, but everything gets left between the lines.”

Between the lines, it was quite a fiasco. It began on what became the last play of practice – a run by Clement. He took an extra little shot far down the field and apparently after the whistle by a defensive back (it wasn’t clear which one). Engram appeared to take exception to that, so hit the DB, which led Ryan to come flying in to level Engram from behind.

After that it was just a mass of bodies, including that of the franchise quarterback somehow in the middle and at the bottom of the whole pile. It took coaches a few minutes to get the players to stop. And when they finally did, Judge ripped into them as he lined them up on the goal line for punishment – four runs up and down the 100-yard field, with two sets of 30 pushups in between.

And when that was over, Judge gathered the players around him, angrily told his coaches to step away, and he lit into them for a 10-minute, expletive-filled rant that figures to scare the Giants out of ever doing that again.

But as mad as Judge was, his players weren’t. Clement said as soon as it was all over, they were “back to laughing and jokes. You’d be surprised. What you see out here is not what we give each other once we get back in there. It’s all a family. We all understand certain things happen, but you can’t let it linger on because that’s not how you win games.”

Actually, all that anger they showed on the field? Maybe that could help them win games – as long as they learn to harness it and maybe not take it out on themselves.

“Players are tired of losing games around here,” Ryan said. “The fan base is tired. Us players are tired. Management gave us an opportunity. They gave us a better roster this year. They allocated the funds to it and we’re coming out competing. We’ve got respect for each other, 100 percent. But we’re going to protect our sides and we’re going to compete.

“If our nucleus, our key veterans, are together, the locker room will follow. Just like the great defensive linemen and the great linebackers and the great leaders of this team in the past. You don’t think they had chippiness about them? You don’t think they had griminess about them? We play in New Jersey, man. There’s going to be some chippiness. There’s going to be some griminess. But we’re leaving it within the lines.

“And I’ll take a team like that. I’ll take a team like that every single day.”