Kadarius Toney back with Giants following Reserve/COVID-19 list placement

The Giants placed 2021 first-round wide receiver Kadarius Toney on the Reserve/COVID-19 list last week.

Ahead of a 2021 regular season that could indeed deal with pandemic-related complications, the Giants recently experienced one. Last week, the team placed first-round wide receiver Kadarius Toney on the Reserve/COVID-19 list. The 2021 No. 20 overall pick thus needed to isolate and participate in meetings from a virtual setting.

There is no current crisis, however. Head coach Joe Judge confirmed Toney is back with Big Blue as the entire team reported to training camp Tuesday.

“[Kadarius] is with us today in the building. So he’s back with us,” Judge told the media Tuesday. “We have a number of guys, for different reasons — we’re actually going to take them a little bit slower. Obviously, coming off of that protocol, as we learned last year with the number of players on our team throughout the season, we’re going to move him around the field and make sure that when he’s ready to go, then we’ll start integrating him with our team. But we’re not going to go ahead and rush anything.

“To get into the process, he’ll be in all the meetings…but in terms of practice itself, we’re not going to do anything with him on the field with the team until we know he’s fully ready to go. His timetable will be different than a lot of the guys last year that we learned from. One thing we really took away from last year was these things are all very specific to each person and what their individual symptoms were or what their exposure was. But that time away from training is what’s critical.”

Toney is undergoing his inaugural NFL training camp in hopes of becoming a consistently reliable target for the developing Daniel Jones. It’s another training camp period, however, that will look different throughout the league.

The protocols for vaccinated players and those for unvaccinated players are essentially night and day. Life will be much easier in training camp for those in the former group. The latter group will need to undergo daily testing for COVID, wear masks, and socially distance themselves.