In ‘The Road Back,’ Cam Skattebo’s injury helped reignite his love of football

John Harbaugh’s resume as a Super Bowl winner and Cam Skattebo’s reputation as a maniacal runner preceded their first meeting.

As Harbaugh walked the halls at the Giants facility during his Jan. 14 interview, Skattebo was alerted to his approaching presence. The running back turned without getting off the elliptical that he was using to rehab his fractured tibia and shouted “Wazzzzup?” like a scene from the old Bud Light commercials.

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“I’ve heard about you,” Harbaugh yelled from afar.

“I’ve heard about you!” Skattebo replied.

A few minutes later, Skattebo was on the phone with his best friend, Caleb Mather, whose advice was “Lock the door on (Harbaugh) so he can’t get out!”

Skattebo received a text from general manager Joe Schoen when Harbaugh accepted the job on Jan. 15.

“I’m juiced, bro,” Skattebo said. “We’re going to be running the rock.”

That interaction and many behind-the-scenes moments unfold during “Skattebo: The Road Back” — an hour-long documentary produced by the Giants and available now on Giants.com and the team’s YouTube channel.

The Post was granted screener’s access and noted these five highlights:

1. “Unfinished business” in Philadelphia

The Giants return from their bye week Monday with their eyes on a Nov. 8 trip to face the Eagles. Skattebo suffered his open tibia fracture in Philadelphia on Oct. 26, 2025, after scoring a touchdown early in the game.

Over the next nine months, Skattebo returned to the city several times for follow-ups with Dr. Samir Mehta, an orthopedic surgeon at Penn Medicine who doesn’t hide that he is an Eagles fan.

“He’s got some unfinished business there,” Giants director of rehabilitation Leigh Weiss told Dr. Mehta, with Skattebo listening in.

“I had two more touchdowns left in the tank in that damn game,” Skattebo added.

2. “Out-of-body experience” forecasted injury

For all the times that Skattebo has discussed his 2025 season-ending injury, he found some new — albeit unexplained — ground to cover.

“Before the game, I actually had an out-of-body experience,” Skattebo said. “We were all praying in the showers. I was holding both my teammates’ hands. It almost felt like, when we were playing, my body was lifted out of my own body. It was weird. I didn’t feel like I was in the present me. I didn’t feel like myself.”

As Skattebo described the second-quarter injury, which happened on an incompletion, “as soon as the doctor touched my foot, I felt pain. He snapped (my ankle) back into place and it was like, ‘A sigh of relief.’ …. Once I got in the X-Ray room, they cut my shoe off, they cut my sock off, I was a half-second from passing out because I had dislocated it so far that the skin ripped.”

Skattebo shared photos of his pre-surgery ankle blown up like a “softball” and his X-rays before (15.1 millimeters of space between his tibia and his ankle) and after (five screws) surgery. He admitted to wondering, “Are they going to cut my foot off?”

3. Done with football

Skattebo often vaguely talks about how he believed that he would retire if he ever had a major football injury. Right around the time that he first met Harbaugh, he “lost” some of his love of football.

“I kind of started not wanting to play,” Skattebo said. “There was a time where it was hard to look at football and say, ‘I want to go do that again.’”

But the best insight on the subject came from his older brother Leo.

“I think there’s always been a piece of him that wanted to see what life was like without football,” Leo said. “The injury allowed him to feel it, and he didn’t want it. For him to be able to say, ‘I still want to do this,’ I think that bodes well for his future because it’s a different level of commitment. When you go into something saying, ‘If something bad happens, I’ll just be done,’ it feels more half-in. Once you have something happen and you have to dig out of the hole to get back, you’ve done all the work. It’s put him a course to be a better version of himself.”

4. Meet “Cameron”

“Skatt” — as everyone calls him — embraces the public persona he has cultivated as a jock who runs through walls.

But there’s always been more than meets the eye, as he showed last week when calling out the double standard the NFL has of promoting him running over tacklers on social media and then penalizing him for lowering his helmet.

In pulling back the curtain on non-game days, Skattebo said, “This is Cameron.”

“Skatt’s the alter ego,” Weiss replied.

Skattebo’s mom, Becky, calls him “Cameron.”

Skattebo calls his parents’ divorce his “turning point of football and life, knowing everything can’t be perfect.”

5. The climax

It all built up to Skattebo’s return Week 1 against the Cowboys.

The dozens of minutes of footage of grueling rehab — including concerns for calf atrophy — and light-hearted moments like Jameis Winston singing “Happy Birthday” to Skattebo at a rooftop party gave way to a touchdown run and a backflip.

“When I stepped onto he field, it was like everything went away — the stress, the pain from my injury, the pain from training camp,” Skattebo said. “I felt like I could run 100 miles per hour. I felt free.”

Harbaugh and Skattebo promise to have each other’s backs — a moment seen in different context after Skattebo answered the bell last week when given a second chance after his benching for too many fumbles.