Giants' Brandon Brown details sports science program, credits competition

Giants assistant general manager Brandon Brown detailed the team's sports science operation Wednesday, naming the staff member who runs it and describing the data the team collects on players at practice.

Asked in the next question why players seemed to be returning from injury more quickly, Brown pointed to competition for roster spots rather than to the data.

"I'm going to go back to the meritocracy," Brown said. "Guys don't want to miss practice because they understand the floor is being raised and you missing practice is an opportunity, frankly, for someone else to take your job, and you see it in real time. It's not just lip service. You've seen rotations of players getting reps with the ones, now getting reps with the twos, guys that were fringed twos now getting reps with the ones. It's really making those daily deposits, and like I said, earning the right."

Harbaugh has used the word "meritocracy" throughout camp. "We say football is the true meritocracy," he told reporters Aug. 6. Brown said a sign reading "Earn the Right" hangs in the team meeting room and applies to staff as well as players.

Brown spoke to reporters at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center four days before the Giants must reduce their roster to 53 players at 6 p.m. Sunday. He has been the team's assistant general manager since February 2022. Four teams have interviewed him for general manager jobs since 2024: the Carolina Panthers and Los Angeles Chargers in 2024, and the Las Vegas Raiders and Jacksonville Jaguars in 2025. Carolina and the Chargers each conducted a second interview.

What Brown said the Giants track

Brown was asked whether he was surprised that wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. had held up through training camp.

"No, honestly no surprise there, and it's primarily to how Harbs structures practice and just the collaboration with sports science," Brown said, according to a transcript published by the team. "And why I say that is when we go to have our workout, (Director of High Performance) Sam Rosengarten, who's heading up the sports science side, where we know where Odell's GPS was from the last time he was playing, what numbers he was hitting, going into his practice loads, what's his yardage, how he's hitting it, his max velocity. All those numbers, call it actionable data, we're seeing that in real time and where he's trending, so there's no guesswork."

Brown said head coach John Harbaugh is "obsessed with the details, those details that go along with sports science and knowing where guys are not only from a performance standpoint but from a hydration standpoint, an output standpoint."

Asked how the emphasis on data has changed under Harbaugh, Brown said the team uses it selectively.

"It's not using data just for the sake of having numbers. It's actionable," he said. "It's what can lead to optimal performance? Coach is obsessed with optimal performance. How can you be, one, your best on game day, practice day, but remain fresh, and how are you recovering? So, it's not just going to how many reps we're accomplishing or charting for practice, but your individual yardage. Where is your hydration at? How are you recovering?"

The Giants announced Rosengarten's hire Feb. 20, one of six football staff additions announced that day. He spent nine seasons with the Baltimore Ravens in the same role. Rosengarten has not spoken publicly about his work with the Giants. GiantsGator found no earlier public description of the operation from Brown or any other team official.

No 2026 injury figure exists

The most commonly used measure of a team's injury burden is Adjusted Games Lost, developed by Aaron Schatz and published by FTN. It counts injuries to expected starters and important situational players, weights them for partial availability and is compiled from the weekly injury reports teams file during the regular season. The 2025 edition was published Mar. 5.

Preseason absences are not included. Schatz wrote that the metric "is only measuring the regular season." The Giants open the season Sept. 13. No 2026 figure has been published, and none can be until the season ends.

The Giants' most recent figures rose. They finished 2024 at 70.3 Adjusted Games Lost, the 13th-fewest in the league, and 2025 at 95.0. The 2025 figure ranked 23rd in a table ordered from fewest injuries to most, making the Giants the 10th-most injured team in the NFL. Harbaugh was hired after that season.

RotoWire's Injury Risk Index, which weights current injury designations rather than games lost, ranked the Giants second-most injured in the NFL in its Wednesday update, with a severity score of 49, seven players on injured reserve or a reserve list and 20 injured overall. The index measures designations on a single day and does not compare seasons.

Calvin Austin III tore an ACL on Tuesday

Wide receiver Calvin Austin III was carted off the practice field Tuesday after a non-contact injury during a one-on-one drill. Adam Schefter of ESPN reported Wednesday that Austin tore an ACL and will miss the season.

"To see that happen, especially just a non-contact type of an injury, it's just kind of shocking to see," Harbaugh said Wednesday. "But it's going to be a long road back, but he'll get back."

Brown was asked about the receiver group without Austin.

"One, my heart goes out to Calvin," Brown said. "When you talk about doing things the right way, he's done it ever since the first day he got here."

Three Giants players tore Achilles tendons over three weeks in June: cornerback Thaddeus Dixon, defensive lineman Roy Robertson-Harris and wide receiver Gunner Olszewski. Harbaugh said at the time that the team was adding four pieces of equipment for strength training, testing and body movement, and that he did not know the cause. "You look for answers, and there are none," he said, according to Patricia Traina of Giants Country. "You can't predict tendons."

Harbaugh said in January that Baltimore had no sports science department

Brown credited Harbaugh for the practice structure and the emphasis on data.

On Jan. 17, the day the Giants finalized his hiring, Harbaugh told Ian O'Connor of The Athletic that concern about operational changes had been "a little overblown." O'Connor published the remarks in a series of posts on X.

"We are going to bolster up the analytics a bit," Harbaugh said. "The Giants actually have a bigger sports science staff than we had. We didn't really have a sports science dept. in Baltimore."

Five weeks later, the Giants announced Rosengarten's hire in a release that described his nine seasons in Baltimore overseeing "player monitoring systems, training load management, recovery protocols, and performance analytics."

The Ravens' injury totals under Harbaugh varied widely. Baltimore posted 180.2 Adjusted Games Lost in 2021, the most in the NFL that season and the highest single-season total Schatz has recorded since he began tracking the statistic in 2001. The Ravens posted 16.3 in 2024, the fewest in the league, and 78.7 in 2025. After the 2021 season, Harbaugh ordered a review of the team's practice schedules, training camp and strength and conditioning program. "We're going to look at everything, and we're going to change a lot," he said in January 2022.

Ravens wide receiver Zay Flowers said on the 4th & Short Podcast after Harbaugh left Baltimore that the practice workload caused the injuries there. "That's why we had a lot of injuries because of how we practiced, how we went," Flowers said, according to Nick Shook of NFL.com. "The load was heavy." Flowers also said Harbaugh "can get anybody prepared." The comments came in a single podcast appearance.

Brown discussed GPS data in 2025 in a different context

Brown was asked on June 5, 2025, how in-game GPS times had contributed to scouting.

"We can extrapolate certain metrics of, hey, does it correlate with the scouting report?" he said. "When you look at the data in itself, we're always finding ways to really poke holes and have checks and balances in our processes. It's a supplemental tool."

Those remarks described the data as a check on scouting reports. Wednesday's remarks described it as a tool for tracking player workload and availability.

The Giants play the Jets in their preseason finale Friday at MetLife Stadium and must reach 53 players Sunday. The first Adjusted Games Lost figure covering the 2026 season will not be published until after the season.