A promise he made leaving Arizona State
Cam Skattebo set himself one rule on his way out of college. One serious injury and he would stop playing. He got seven games into his NFL career before that rule was tested.
The New York Giants running back told Kay Adams on the “Up and Adams Show” earlier today that he “definitely” thought about walking away after the ankle injury that ended his rookie season. It happened in his eighth appearance, a 38-20 defeat at Philadelphia on Oct. 26, and the severity of it left him no route back onto the field last year.
“Yeah, definitely. I would say probably a month in,” said Skattebo, now 24. “The first month was kind of like, ‘Damn, do I really want to do this?’ And then, you know, it was seven games. I was like, ‘You know, I got to go back and play.’”
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Eight games were enough to build something
The season that nearly finished his career was not a small one. Skattebo, a fourth-round pick out of Arizona State in the 2025 draft, played eight games and started five. He ran for 410 yards and five touchdowns and added 24 catches for 207 yards and two more scores. For a back taken that late, on a team spending most of its autumn losing, those are numbers that buy a player time.
The rule he had written for himself came from the same place. “Coming out of college going in the NFL, I think I gave myself one rule and it was, if I ever got a major injury, I was done playing,” he said. “And that happened seven games into my career, so it kind of sucked.”
Fourteen hours a day with nothing in them
What followed was months of sitting still. Skattebo points to that stretch rather than the ankle as the thing that changed him. “I was able to sit at home for 14 hours a day, do absolutely nothing, for weeks on end,” he said. “So just finding who I was, finding my happiness, finding the person I wanted to be on and off the field.”
He is back in camp now and the Giants open at home against Dallas on Sept. 13. Skattebo says the conversations with family and friends are finished and the outside noise went with them. Whether the ankle holds up across a full season is a different question, and nobody in East Rutherford gets an answer until the hits start landing again.
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