Jaxson Dart might be answer to Joe Schoen / Brian Daboll QB quest for Giants
The New York Giants introduce first-round pick Jaxson Dart at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center, Friday, April 25, 2025, in East Rutherford. Credit: Corey Sipkin
There were a lot of reasons for the Giants to hire Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll in January 2022. They were supposed to bring stability, communication and new thinking to an organization that for way too long hadn’t had any of those things.
But the biggest item on their to-do list was to identify, draft and develop a young quarterback the way they had done with Josh Allen in Buffalo.
On Friday, they woke up able to move forward on that mandate for the first time in their tenures with the team. Technically, it was Day 1,190 since Schoen was hired, but in a lot of ways, it felt like Day One.
Jaxson Dart is now and will forever be, for better or worse, Schoen and Daboll’s guy. He’s the quarterback to whom their legacies will now be attached. And now they have something they never had before: a clear direction.
Is it the right one? Time will tell. But it sure beats the rudderless drift most of these past three-plus years have felt like.
“You’d like to have a young franchise quarterback,” Schoen said last week before he finally made this happen. “Everybody wants that.”
Now he finally has one.
After he pulled off the move that resulted in turning in the ticket for the first quarterback he’d ever drafted, Schoen described the process as “exhausting.” He said the process of getting to Thursday night’s trade and selection began last May, but in reality it began years before that.
They inherited Daniel Jones upon their arrival and bet on him with that four-year contract that lasted less than two, but he was always a leftover they tried to whip into a fresh meal. They brought in veterans Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston this offseason, but those are free-agent placeholders whose times with the team likely will be footnotes to their careers. They even tried to land others with whom they likely were more enamored — from full-press pursuits of Matthew Stafford and Aaron Rodgers this offseason to attempts to trade up for Cam Ward and Drake Maye in this draft and the last — but none of those resulted in a player on the roster.
Then, when the opportunity was there on Thursday, when Schoen believed that the value matched the talent, he made what might become the move of his career. If it pans out, he won’t be known as the GM who gave away Saquon Barkley, he’ll be remembered as the GM who brought in Dart. Instead of those shoulder-slumped conversations between him and John Mara that filled most of last year’s “Hard Knocks” offseason program that chronicled the Giants’ ineptitude, the defining image of his time here may wind up being the snapshot taken on Friday of Mara, Schoen and Daboll grinning with Dart while the quarterback held up his new Giants jersey.
“I’ll probably, on the ride home, be able to decompress,” he said on Thursday of the breath-holding stress of trying to trade up, eventually to the 25th overall pick, and making the selection happen.
On Friday morning, though, Schoen told Newsday the enormity of what he’d done hadn’t yet set in. There still were the second and third days of the draft to be ready for.
At some point it will.
It certainly did for Dart on Friday when he visited the Giants’ facility for the first time as a member of the organization. Walking through a lobby where Lombardi Trophies are encased and murals of Eli Manning and Phil Simms and other championship players fill the hallways, Dart understood the expectations that are on his 21-year-old shoulders.
“This place is iconic,” Dart said. “Everybody in the National Football League knows it. If you are a fan, you know it. I’m blessed to be here. I am humbled by it. It’s extraordinary to see it on the wall. When you walk by it, you can feel it in the air when you are here . . . To be a part of this is amazing.”
He also recognized the immediacy of his task. When a team trades up for a quarterback in the first round, it isn’t to take a flyer or a half-hearted swing. Doing so for the second quarterback taken in a draft class, ahead of some more high-profile options that included Shedeur Sanders and Jalen Milroe, punctuated the Giants’ faith in Dart ever further.
“As a competitor, you have that belief in yourself,” Dart said, “but when you are able to be part of an organization that sees it the same way, it’s special.”
There still is work to do, or course. Daboll must apply his supposedly magic touch to the quarterback he coveted in this draft and grow him from the unsteady seedling who walked in through the doors on Friday into first an NFL player, then a starter and, potentially, a star.
“I feel like I am just ready for this,” Dart said.
After three years of holding patterns, the Giants are, too.
One of the several embarrassing viral moments of Schoen’s time with the Giants came last summer when a conversation he was having with Bears general manager Ryan Poles was caught by the microphones of “Hard Knocks.”
Poles had just drafted Caleb Williams first overall. “Gotta be nice,” Schoen told Poles, referring to not having to forever be on the lookout for future quarterbacks.
Finally — or maybe “beginningly” is a better word — Schoen and Daboll get to feel that for themselves.
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.
