Giants QB Daniel Jones, Jets QB Aaron Rodgers and what separates them
Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, left, and Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers Credit: Corey Sipkin; Ed Murray
Drew Lock first met Daniel Jones when they were assigned to the same room at the Senior Bowl in 2019, and he got the sense right away that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with his bunkmate.
“I tried to stay up as late as he did studying the playbook,” Lock — reunited with Jones as Giants teammates this past spring — recalled of the cognitive competition the two had in Mobile, Alabama.
Jones was impossible to beat.
“It was like, ‘Crap, I've got to go to bed, buddy. You’re going to have to turn the light off,’ ” Lock said of his nightly concession speech.
Five years later, teammates still marvel at the way Jones goes about the business of being a quarterback.
“Man, he's probably the biggest work ethic guy I know,” second-year receiver Jaylin Hyatt said. “He is the first guy in the building. I don't even know what time he gets here, maybe 5:30? He stays here forever, and he is the last guy to leave. That's what you want in a quarterback. When your quarterback comes in here, he's the first guy in the building and he’s the last guy out, it just shows how much he respects this, how much he respects this team and how much he wants to improve and do whatever he has to do.”
Even general manager Joe Schoen, who spent a good deal of this offseason shopping for a potential replacement for Jones, loves the way he handles all the pressures and darts that come with playing the most important position in the organization.
“Of all the guys on the team, he probably does the best job tuning out the noise,” Schoen said as the team reported to training camp this past week. “I think he's wired for the position in terms of those strengths . . . He's a great teammate. He's a leader.”
Funny, but no one ever seems to carry on about his play. Whenever the people who know him the best, the ones who work with him on a daily basis, fawn over Jones, it is always in regard to his effort and personality and ancillary attributes but hardly ever about the way he actually plays football.
A few miles away in Florham Park, they seem to love their quarterback, too, and just about every day he hits the practice field with them, he gives them more reasons to do so. Aaron Rodgers, a football savant blessed with passing skills nearly unparalleled in the history of football, spends training camp practices carving up one of the NFL’s top five defenses with no-look throws, check-with-me route adjustments and plenty of tutorials between snaps that help both the offense and defense improve.
“You’d be silly not to [listen],” Jets coach Robert Saleh said of Rodgers’ shared wisdom. “He’s one of the more accomplished players in the history of football, and if he has a nugget to give you, if I was a young guy, I’d write it down pretty in my notebook and I’d remember it for the rest of my life.”
Of course, that positivity comes after Rodgers spent the last few months blowing off the team's mandatory minicamp, flirting with a vice presidential bid that likely would have ended his playing career, spouting various conspiracy theories on any number of podcasts, stumping for a trade for former teammate Davante Adams that no one else seems to want, and giving the entire organization the heebie jeebies every time he comes close to an open microphone.
He is a player who reads and hears everything said about him, using it to drive his freakishly competitive nature but also allowing them to become peripheral battles that do nothing to advance the football. The headaches-to-snaps ratio he has given the Jets is exceedingly out of whack with the price the team has paid to acquire and keep him.
There is no such thing as a perfect quarterback, at least not outside the municipal limits of Kansas City. But imagine if the Giants and Jets somehow could merge their quarterbacks with the most positive traits of each going into one player? That might be as close to an ideal QB as the league has ever seen.
Even a dash of Jones’ seriousness and focus would go a long way against the reckless hubris Rodgers carries wherever he goes. Transplant some of Rodgers’ physical skills to augment Jones’ granite-steady personality and he might be unstoppable.
Both starting quarterbacks overcame a lot to get to where they are this week, on the field leading their teams in the earliest stages of training camp in a season that likely will determine just how long each will stick around and how each will be remembered in these parts. Both returned from very serious injuries — Rodgers a torn Achilles, Jones a torn ACL — with timelines that initially indicated they shouldn’t be doing what they have been doing the past few days. And yet there they were in relative full capacity.
Deep down, though, as they watch their on-field leaders this summer, what would each of the franchises and their fan bases have given to be able to implant a bit of what the other team has into their own quarterback during those operations they underwent last fall?
It’s a science-fiction question, of course, not something that could really happen. But it’s something to at least chew on as Jones and Rodgers take the Giants and Jets forward over the coming months, each relying on very different strengths to do so and each trying to overcome their very different flaws.
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.
