Every August, somebody does something dumb before camp opens and a coach somewhere reaches for the antacids. This year it came early, and it came from a running back the Giants can’t afford to lose.
Cam Skattebo, coming off a season-ending ankle injury last October, attempted a backflip at Fanatics Fest over the weekend. He over-rotated on a heavily cushioned floor, stumbled on the landing, and popped right back up. The clip made the rounds. The front office, presumably, watched it through its fingers.
Speaking to SiriusXM’s “The Fantasy Footballers” afterward, Skattebo said he’s been doing backflips since he was four and that the floor — a bouncy WWE-style surface — launched him higher than he expected. “I was mid-air, like, holy cow, I’m not gonna land this, I’m way too high,” he said, via NFL.com. He insisted he’s “perfectly fine” and vowed he won’t hurt himself before the season.
Now, I’ve coached enough kids who thought they were indestructible to know that “perfectly fine” and “actually fine” aren’t always the same animal. But the ankle held. He got up under his own power. That’s the part that matters.
His quarterback, Jaxson Dart, saw it differently than most. “When I looked at it though, I was like, that’s the most explosive I’ve seen Skat,” Dart said. “He over-rotated. He looks real good, man.”
That’s a quarterback reading the tape and finding a silver lining where everybody else found a near-disaster. The kid got airborne and got down without a limp. If you’re grading lower-body explosion coming off ankle surgery, that’s a data point — and I don’t say that easily.
Skattebo also addressed the reputation that’s been building around him — the wild-child label he’s carried since his Arizona State days and into his rookie year in New York. He said he enjoys it, mostly. The part he doesn’t like is when people equate reckless with stupid.
“I less enjoy the brain-dead kind of guy,” Skattebo said. “But it is what it is. I mean, the New York people love it, so I’m just gonna keep being me. And if they wanna say I’m brain-dead and I don’t have no brain, then who cares? F— it, you know?”
Here’s the thing nobody’s talking about enough: through eight games last season, Skattebo had 410 rushing yards and five touchdowns, plus 207 receiving yards and two more scores. He was one of five players in the entire league with 400-plus rushing and 200-plus receiving through Week 8 — alongside De’Von Achane, Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson, and Jonathan Taylor. That’s the company he was keeping before the ankle gave out.
A fourth-round pick out of Arizona State, Skattebo became a fixture in the Giants’ offense faster than anyone expected. The production was real. The ankle cut it short. And now he’s flipping off bouncy floors at fan conventions with veterans set to report July 28.
You want your bell-cow back protecting his investment, not showing off for a crowd. But the kid didn’t get hurt, and the explosion Dart saw on that landing is the same explosion that put him in rarefied company last fall. The film doesn’t lie — even when it’s shot on a convention floor.
Sources
- CBS Sports — Giants’ Cam Skattebo on viral backflip fail, wild reputation
- Bussin’ With The Boys — viral video clip (via CBS Sports)