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Giants Now (5/8): Judge's head coach debut is set

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Joe Judge era set to begin on MNF vs. Pittsburgh

Joe Judge, who became 19th head coach in Giants history this past January, will make his debut on Monday, Sept. 14 in MetLife Stadium against the Pittsburgh Steelers. It will be the Giants' first Monday night home opener since 1995. Judge was asked if his first game will be particularly special because it will be showcased on a Monday night.

"For me, any game is going to have the same amount of juice," he said Thursday when the NFL announced the 2020 schedule. "I think everyone is going to have a lot of energy for the opener, us and Pittsburgh. It's going to be a situation where look, you get to play under the lights, you get to play at home. But it's the opening game for both teams. Both teams will be coming out of training camp sick of beating up on each other and ready to see an opponent."

While the longtime Patriots assistance coach takes it one game at a time, he did admit there is a little more juice now that the schedule is revealed.

"I'll tell you what, when you get the schedule, it definitely does give you a little surge of energy," Judge said. "It stimulates a lot of conversation between all areas of the organization - support staff, coaching staff -- and you start preparing immediately for it. The number one positive is we're getting ready to play football, so that's the biggest thing. Once you get the schedule, it starts moving a little bit faster in your mind in terms of preparing for what's in front of you. The thing we were waiting to see a little bit on was how some of the cross-country games played out. That ties in a little bit to how you plan out a lot of your travel for the year, which is tied to how you practice those weeks. You start mapping out how you're going to go about each week by week through the season.

"We can start working on hotels and you start having more conversations that are going to tie into how you're going to plan and prepare throughout the flow of the season. You look at the bye week, you look at how shortly before that is the Thursday night game, which leads into a Monday night game. How can you use some of the breaks in the season to help your players? How can we structure practice accordingly? You're also tying in the new rules with our limited number of padded practices. You just start calculating as you look on down the list of opponents."

View iconic photos from the all-time series between the Giants and their 2020 opponents.