The Giants learned yesterday that their defense lost the player it could least afford to lose, as defensive end Osi Umenyiora will require season-ending surgery following a knee injury in a preseason game against the Jets.

If the Giants are serious about repeating as Super Bowl champions, they now must do everything in their power to convince Michael Strahan to come back.

When Strahan announced his retirement in June, the Giants appeared to be well-positioned to move on without him. But that was mostly because Umenyiora, who led the team with 13 sacks in 2007, had become what Strahan was for many years: one of the best defensive ends in football. With Umenyiora and Strahan as the starting defensive ends, the Giants led the league in sacks during the 2007 regular season, and the defensive line gave Tom Brady fits in the Super Bowl. The Giants aren’t the same team without that pass rush.

So it’s time for the Giants to pull out all the stops in trying to convince Strahan to return to the team. Strahan walked away from a $4 million salary for the 2008 season and has taken a job as a TV analyst for Fox, and the Giants will need to make him among the highest-paid defensive players in football if they’re going to convince him to turn his back on his new TV career and subject his 36-year-old body to the rigors of another season.

Just as Jets owner Woody Johnson got personally involved in the acquisition of Brett Favre, bringing back Strahan would mean so much to the franchise that Giants co-owners John Mara and Steve Tisch should reach out to him. If Strahan is adamant about remaining retired, there’s nothing the Giants can do about it. But if there’s even a chance that he can be persuaded to come back, Mara and Tisch should join general manager Jerry Reese and coach Tom Coughlin in doing the persuading.

The Giants are in good enough salary cap shape to welcome Strahan back, even with a healthy pay increase. And as the team prepares to force fans to buy personal seat licenses to keep their season tickets in the new stadium, Mara and Tisch should spend the kind of money needed to remain at the top of the NFL.

If Strahan did come back to the Giants, he would do so having missed all of training camp and the preseason. But Strahan showed last year, when he contemplated retirement throughout the summer and didn’t report until the week before the first regular-season game, that he keeps himself in good shape anyway and doesn’t need a lot of time to prepare. Even if he’s not in top shape, the Giants are a better team with Strahan.

Without Strahan, the Giants will have a lot of shuffling to do on their defense, and not a lot of time to do it. Justin Tuck, who has started just three games in his three-year career, is now the team’s best defensive end. Mathias Kiwanuka, who has shuttled between defensive and linebacker, will most likely move back to defensive end on a permanent basis. Renaldo Wynn, a veteran who signed a free-agent contract with the Giants during the offseason, was originally slated to be mostly a role player on short-yardage downs but now may need to be an every-down player. Dave Tollefson, a backup who played sparingly in six games last season, becomes an important part of the defense. The Giants will most likely need to end their practice of using three or four defensive ends on the field at the same time on passing downs.

Umenyiora suffered the injury on what looked like a routine play. He attempted to rush to the outside of Jets left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson and planted his foot just as Ferguson pushed him. Umenyiora went to the ground, got right back up, and was shoved by Ferguson again, and then he went down as the play ended.

Although Umenyiora had to be carted off the field, the initial reports were that his injury wasn’t serious, and immediately following the game, Coughlin said team doctors did not believe Umenyiora had suffered ligament damage. But an MRI exam on Sunday showed a torn lateral meniscus that will require surgery and a lengthy rehabilitation process.

The injury to Umenyiora is the latest reminder that preseason games, in which players risk their health in meaningless exhibitions, are a plague on the National Football League. Umenyiora was the highest-profile player to suffer an injury over the weekend, but he was far from the only one. Houston Texans wide receiver Harry Williams was taken off the field in an ambulance and needed emergency surgery after suffering a fracture of the C3 vertebra in an exhibition against the Dallas Cowboys on Friday night. Doctors said Williams’s long-term prognosis is good, but the injury likely ended his football career.

This is not the first time the annual Giants-Jets preseason game has ended with an important player hurt. In 2003, Jets quarterback Chad Pennington broke his wrist when Giants linebacker Brandon Short tackled him in a preseason game and Pennington had to miss the first six games of the regular season. In 1998, Giants cornerback Jason Sehorn blew out his knee returning a kickoff in a preseason game against the Jets; he missed the whole year and was never as good a player as he had been before the injury.

NFL owners like the preseason because it gives them an excuse to saddle season-ticket buyers with the price of two more games, but it’s long past time for the league and the players union to shorten the preseason. The risks of these glorified scrimmages far outweigh the rewards.

But the Giants can’t afford to waste any time worrying about the many problems associated with the NFL preseason. Right now the Giants have one immediate problem with one clear solution: Big Blue needs Strahan back.

Mr. Smith is a writer for Fanhouse.com.