For better or for worse, the New York Giants paid Daniel Jones last year.
Jones received a four-year, $160 million deal in March 2023 that made him one of the top-10 quarterbacks in the NFL at the time based on average salary. News of Jones’s massive contract was largely met with bewildered and skeptical reactions, with current NFL players even questioning whether the Giants quarterback was worth all that money.
Over a year after Jones was paid, Giants general manager Joe Schoen opened up about how Jones’s agents, Brian Murphy and Camron Hahn, sold him on the $160 million deal.
"There’s not really a middle class of the QBs right now,” Schoen said, per the New York Post's Ryan Dunleavy. “Trust me. That was the sell of the agent at the time. They do their homework, too. ‘All these guys are coming up.’”
Jones’s agents weren’t wrong.
In this past offseason alone, several franchise quarterbacks got their bag including Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow, Green Bay Packers’ Jordan Love and Jacksonville Jaguars’ Trevor Lawrence, who each received top-of-the-market deals that amounted to more than $50 million per year.
Jones’s $40 million average is currently tied for 14th-most at his position, and he’ll likely drop down a peg if and when Dak Prescott secures his new contract with the Dallas Cowboys.
Jones, who suffered a season-ending ACL injury last year, took the field for NFL preseason action on Saturday and had a painful outing to forget. In the Giants’ 28-10 loss to the Houston Texans, Jones went 11-of-18 for 138 yards and recorded two interceptions, one of which was returned for a touchdown.
His career-best campaign for the Giants came in 2022, when he threw for 3,205 yards and 15 touchdowns, adding 708 rushing yards and seven rushing touchdowns.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Giants GM Reveals Smart Way Daniel Jones’s Agent Sold Him on $160M Deal.
