This is it. Making Jaxson Dart the starting quarterback is the last card New York Giants coach Brian Daboll has to play.
Daboll has overseen a team that has gone 11-33-1 since starting the 2022 season 7-2. Daboll’s Giants are a miserable 3-17 since the start of last season.
The coach knew he was on a short leash when he barely survived last season’s 3-14 embarrassment, so there was no way he was going to leave the head coaching opportunity he sought for so many years in the hands of a fading Russell Wilson.
Daboll had to turn to Dart, the only quarterback the Giants have drafted since Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen took over four years ago. Daboll inherited Daniel Jones, and that arranged marriage started with promise, but crashed and burned into an ugly divorce last season.
As Daboll presented his case for another year to ownership late last season, he had to sell John Mara on his ability to build a winner around a franchise quarterback. A winding process led the Giants to Dart, who has the type of fiery personality Daboll covets in a quarterback. The Giants dealt a pair of third-round picks to move up nine spots to take Dart with the 25th pick in this year’s draft.
From there, the clock immediately started ticking to the moment Dart would take over.
Giants brass went through the motions of extolling the value of Wilson’s leadership and cautioning that Dart needed time to develop. Surely, if the Giants weren’t 0-3 and Wilson didn’t appear to be on his last legs, the Giants would have stuck with the veteran to give Dart more time to apprentice. But with a regime on the hot seat, there was never going to be patience to keep Dart on the sideline.
It became obvious this summer that there was no chance Dart would redshirt his rookie season, similar to what Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes famously did in 2017. Daboll gave off the vibe of a proud father when he beamed about Dart’s impressive performances this preseason.
Having veteran quarterback Jameis Winston on the roster provided the Giants the opportunity to keep Dart on the sideline even if Wilson stumbled. But Daboll eliminated that possibility by making Dart the No. 2 quarterback heading into the season.
That move erased any question about how Daboll viewed Dart’s readiness to play. If Wilson got injured on the first snap of the season opener, Dart would have been thrust into action for the rest of the game.
Daboll continued to press the issue by installing a package of plays for Dart that got the rookie onto the field for three snaps in each of the past two games. That created an uncomfortable dynamic in Sunday night’s loss to the Chiefs in the home opener when fans cheered as Dart came onto the field and booed when he was replaced by Wilson.
Daboll didn’t need to subject Wilson to that just so Dart could hand the ball off a few times. But it was another sign that Daboll’s primary focus was preparing Dart to take over.
That the change comes a week after Wilson threw for 450 yards and three touchdowns in a 40-37 overtime loss to the Cowboys shows just how short the leash was for the 14th-year veteran. The sequence in Sunday’s 22-9 loss to the Chiefs when Wilson air-mailed three incompletions from inside the red zone was the final straw, similar to how Daniel Jones taking a sack with receivers running open on a flea-flicker in Week 10 last season led to his benching.
There was some thought about delaying Dart’s debut so that it wouldn’t come against the undefeated Chargers’ suffocating defense, according to The Athletic’s Dianna Russini. But even though the Giants face the winless Saints in Week 5, there are no soft landing spots in the NFL.
It’s not as if the Giants can only play Dart against the bad defenses. Eli Manning survived a 0 quarterback rating against the vaunted Ravens defense during his rookie season. If Dart has the intangibles the Giants believe he possesses, he’ll overcome whatever adversity he faces this season.
There inevitably will be challenges for Dart, who has barely worked with the first-team offense in practice. Dart appears to be well-liked by teammates, but it will bear monitoring how veterans who spent months raving about Wilson’s leadership embrace the quarterback change.
“If you kind of look at the history of football, it hasn’t always served people well to just throw people in the fire,” captain Darius Slayton said two weeks ago. “We believe (Dart is) a good football player, but at the same time, this league is hard, this league is tough, and you see players get chewed up and spit out all the time by this league, which is something I would never want to happen to him.”
That is obviously a viewpoint shared by others in the organization, since it was leaked to ESPN’s Adam Schefter on the eve of the Week 2 game in Dallas that the Giants “would prefer to continue to be patient, let Wilson play well and give Dart the time he needs to develop.”
Obviously, Wilson didn’t keep up his end of the “play well” part of that plan. So, it became impossible for Daboll to remain patient when he clearly believed Dart was ready.
Daboll has been the architect of an offense that ranks 31st in scoring since the start of the 2023 season. There’s no one left to shift the blame to now that his hand-picked quarterback is at the controls. This is Daboll’s opportunity to prove that the work he did as Josh Allen’s offensive coordinator in Buffalo can be replicated with Dart.
It’s impossible to quantify what will represent success for Dart. But for Daboll, he’s not the quarterbacks coach or offensive coordinator. He’ll still need this move to translate to some wins to justify another season.
The upside of turning to Dart so early is there will be far less ambiguity about his potential than if he sat for most of the season. If Dart is the real deal, many of the errors committed by Daboll and Schoen over the past four years will be forgotten. And if Dart flops, their successors will have enough information to make a decision about his future.
A phone call between Daboll and Dart moments after the Giants drafted the Ole Miss star was captured on camera. They concluded the conversation by sharing “I love yous” before Daboll said, “I’m banking on you.” Five months later, Daboll is putting his career in the hands of the 22-year-old who replied, “Smart man.”
(Photo: Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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