So here we all come, trampling at a volume and grace reminiscent of stampeding baby elephants, to log on to our social media app of choice and say that we saw it coming.
Here we all go, scrolling back to draft night in 2019, the moment the Giants selected Daniel Jones, a baby-faced version of Eli Manning, seemingly out of some kind of recreation fantasy instead of actual football reasons, and deleting all the jokes.
Let’s watch the Sunday feature-length interviewers suddenly request a sit-down with the Giants’ fourth-year QB who just won his first playoff game. Let’s keep an eye out for the insufferable corners of the I-watch-more-film-than-you football world and anonymous executives who all of a sudden have a nice thing to say about him.
Are you ready?
Matt Krohn/USA TODAY Sports
This has to be the one touch of gray for the Giants quarterback, who now has his team in the divisional round of the playoffs a year after we were all planning out the rest of his life on some pristine Carolina golf course. When Brian Daboll arrived to coach the Giants in January, who pointed at Jones and said “he can use that guy like the economy version of Josh Allen” and said it with any degree of confidence? What’s it like to be one of the few people who believes in yourself one day, and an entire football-watching world say they were always right behind you the next?
The Giants didn’t know, even if they were Southern nice about the whole thing. The team didn’t pick up Jones’s fifth-year option on his rookie contract. The general manager who drafted him (Dave Gettleman) “retired.” He’ll be an unrestricted free agent after the postseason and could have easily found out about the team’s continued interest in his services the way the rest of us did, via some leak to an NFL insider a week ago. Again, this isn’t to say the Giants have treated him poorly—given the recent trend of discarding these draftees like penny stocks, the fact that he lasted four years at all is a minor miracle—but it is a fine example of how fickle this whole exercise can be.
That’s why this weekend of playoff football was, all at once, wonderful and exciting and Starbucks-line infuriating. Both Jones and Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence finished their games plastered over by a television graphic saying they were the first player in NFL history to accomplish some kind of wild statistical feat, in Jones’s case that he was the first player with 300-plus passing yards, two-plus passing TDs and 70-plus rushing yards in a postseason game. Both of them played their teams into the second round of the playoffs. Geno Smith had the Seahawks in the ring for a few quarters against the 49ers. The Dolphins made it to Buffalo in the first place thanks to Tua Tagovailoa.
And all of them, in one way or another, were left by the schematic side of the road by coaches and coordinators who didn’t know, didn’t care or couldn’t figure out how to make it work. There’s a parallel universe in which they are all discarded from the playoff field and fighting over a role as a freelance DraftKings spokesperson.
This is why we can avoid the mad rush to treat Jones like a Sonic Youth record and pretend we always got it when no one did before Daboll and Giants offensive coordinator Mike Kafka came along. We have to realize it’s unfair and irresponsible to evaluate talent until a quarterback is in a system that cares to accentuate his strengths. We should stop throwing around the word “bust” like it has anything to do with the people who don’t get to choose their employer. In a perfect world, for the betterment of the game, Andy Reid would have 19 quarterbacks on his roster at all times.
Of course players get better. Of course Jones is more capable now than he was as a wobbly-legged rookie. Of course the Vikings’ defense is among the worst in recent NFL history, less reliable than that wooden boardwalk roller coaster on the pier. No hype train leaves the station without its caveats.
But the idea of this Giants team remaining alive in the playoffs torpedoes so many of the ideas we hold about the quarterback whisperer and the guru. If the 2022 NFL season did anything for us, it blasted the league into more definitive categories: Those who can make the best out of a situation, and those who cannot.
Daboll and Kafka are among those people who can, and thank goodness for Jones. He’ll likely start the next season with a new contract, a wide receiver listed before the 13th page of our fantasy draft magazine and a body of work we can start to appreciate for what it is.
Jones was always a good quarterback. It took only four years for the NFL to figure that out. Enjoy pretending you thought otherwise. You’ll be in good company this week.
