Skattebo starts camp as the guy, but New York keeps handing him company. Tyrone Tracy and Devin Singletary were already rotating with him behind the starting offensive line before the Giants went out and signed Najee Harris, a 242-pound downhill runner Harbaugh has openly compared to the bruisers he liked in Baltimore. None of that reads like a team that thinks its lead back is safely entrenched.
What made Skattebo worth all this attention in the first place is simple: he doesn't go down on first contact. That was the entire pitch coming out of Arizona State, and it held up against NFL front sevens too, showing up as touchdowns and yards after contact he wasn't supposed to get. He was outproducing every other rookie in the league in scrimmage yards and scores before Philadelphia ended his season early, and he's said flatly he isn't changing how he runs because of it.
The injury itself is the honest risk here, not the depth chart. A dislocated ankle with an open tibia fracture and a torn deltoid ligament is not a sprain teams shrug off, and Harbaugh has already acknowledged Skattebo isn't fully back even while praising what he's doing on a leg still catching up. He got the start in the preseason opener and still watched Tracy take over by the third snap — the exact kind of committee usage that chips away at a bell-cow workload before the ankle even finishes healing.
Josh Jacobs runs the same style Skattebo does — pad level down, finish through the tackle, pick up what isn't blocked — but Jacobs walks into Green Bay with a settled room and no rookie behind him waiting for touches. Skattebo has to prove the ankle holds up under the exact contact that made him worth watching, in a backfield the Giants are still actively reinforcing. Take the health at face value and the ceiling is the same; doubt it, and Jacobs is the safer version of the same runner.
