If Giants QB Daniel Jones needs another sympathy call, he may be disconnected from starting job
Daniel Jones #8 of the Giants leaves the field after a game against the Minnesota Vikings at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, Sep. 8, 2024. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Old habits die hard for Saquon Barkley.
Even while the running back was basking in the aftermath of his three-touchdown debut with the Eagles in Brazil on Sept. 6, he still found the time to do something he so often had to do during his tenure with the Giants.
He gave Daniel Jones a pep talk. And from his brief telling of it, it sounded a lot like the familiar refrains Barkley would try to deliver whenever that familiar darkness hung over his former teammate and quarterback when they were together with the Giants.
“I talked to him,” Barkley told reporters in Philadelphia this past week. “I’m really good friends with DJ. Obviously, he didn’t have the game that he wants, [so] I just let him know, just go out there and play free and do what you do best.”
That says a lot about Barkley as a person and a leader, but it also speaks loudly regarding the depths to which this Giants season already has reached. Think about it for a moment: A player on an opposing team within the same division felt he had to call the Giants’ sixth-year quarterback to boost his spirits and give him advice.
This is where they are, Jones and the Giants, at an ugly crossroads after a horrifying performance in the home opener. In the course of three hours last Sunday, his play stripped away just about all of the positivity and optimism that he’d managed to build heading into the season, from fighting to come back from a torn ACL to surviving the replacement quarterback hunting expedition the front office embarked on during the spring.
Even Jones’ most ardent supporters appear ready to give up on him. Some have.
“The Daniel Jones that I saw on Sunday in that game is not the Daniel Jones that I watched take them to the divisional round of the playoffs,” former Giants tight end and another Jones teammate, Kyle Rudolph, said on “Up & Adams” on Thursday. “It’s not the guy I played with when I was there for a year. His confidence looks completely destroyed. How can you blame him? Every time he goes out there, he’s fighting for his life.”
That’s a bit of an over-simplification. Although the Giants’ protection last week wasn’t perfect, it was much better than what Jones played behind last season.
No, the problem was Jones. He looked like a spooked rookie playing in a haunted house, tensed up from the expectations of having things jump out at him, even when they weren’t there. It threw off his timing, threw off his mechanics and threw off his confidence.
And now it may throw off his career if the Giants can’t fix him in time for Sunday’s game against the Commanders.
If Jones shows no real improvement between Week 1 and Week 2, if he continues to throw off target and have obvious trouble making decisions with the ball, the Giants may be forced to try to salvage their season with someone else playing the position.
Things are so bad for Jones right now that one of the betting sites, Betonline.ag, posted how the odds of each team would be impacted if they turned to their backup quarterback. The Giants were one of only three teams in the league whose chances would improve with such a switch. The other two were the Panthers and Titans, both of whom have second-year starters ahead of seasoned veterans. Jones is the Giants’ seasoned veteran.
Coach Brian Daboll said he did not contemplate a quarterback change in the loss to the Vikings and said as plainly as possible this past week that he’d be sticking with Jones for this upcoming game. Anything beyond that, though, would seem to depend largely on what Jones brings with him to Landover.
Publicly, Daboll’s advice on the matters that have tripped up Jones are obvious and succinct.
How can Jones and the offense get dynamic rookie receiver Malik Nabers more involved?
“Throw him the ball,” Daboll said.
What does he want the offensive identity to be?
“Scoring points.”
Are there concerns that the offense hasn’t recorded a passing touchdown this season, not just in the one regular-season game but in the three preseason games as well?
“Our focus is trying to score points,” he said.
If Jones can’t do that this week against a Washington defense that was picked apart by Baker Mayfield and might be without two starters because of late-week injuries, someone else may need to give it a try.
The cautionary tale in this Jones saga is a former Giants backup, David Carr, whose promising career was undone after he spent his first several years playing behind a porous O-line with the expansion Texans. In five years, he was sacked 249 times! Jones has been with the Giants for five years and one game and has been sacked 184 times. But their sacks-per-start average is a lot closer: Carr’s is 3.32 while Jones’s is 3.06.
“He’s got to get his confidence back,” Rudolph said. “I don’t know how they get it back . . . Hopefully he can find that magic, find that confidence and be that guy who I played with when I was there because the ability is there.”
Carr earned a Super Bowl ring with the Giants as Eli Manning’s backup but could never fully recover from that quarterbacking trauma. Jones still has a chance.
He just can’t afford to play at a level that garners any more pity calls from Saquon.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
