The Giants are even more desperate to be right about an Ole Miss quarterback named Jaxson Dart than they were with an Ole Miss quarterback named Eli Manning, who would become the greatest at the position the Giants ever had.
More desperate? Yeah, they are. When Ernie Accorsi made the trade to get Eli on Draft Day in 2004, the Giants were just a little over three years removed from their last Super Bowl, even if it was a game they lost as badly as they did to the Ravens. It’s different now, just because the Giants have been one of the two worst teams in pro football — along with … wait for it … the Jets — for a decade.
And we are moving up on 14 years since the Giants last appearance in the Super Bowl, the second one they got off Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and the Patriots. In that time, the Giants have won a single playoff game, against the Vikings in January of 2023. Now they’re in a stretch where they’ve won just three of their last 20 games and are 0-3 going into this Sunday’s game against the Chargers.
So Brian Daboll gives the ball to a new Ole Miss kid, in the hopes that he can at least change the way Giants fans are looking at this team and this season. It is hard to believe that with the schedule at which the Giants are looking the rest of the way that Dart can save the season. But if he shows enough arm and talent and even swagger — and if they can keep him in one piece — he might be able to save the jobs of Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen, who are still holding on for dear life.
“It didn’t matter to me if we won with Russell Wilson, because I knew that in the long run Wilson didn’t matter,” a Giants fan I know said to me on Friday.
This is a fan who happened to be in Oxford, Miss., last fall to see Dart play a home game for Lane Kiffin.
“At least the kid playing for us now, and maybe getting us to believe we might have a future again, gets me excited about watching the Giants again,” he said. “Let’s face it, they haven’t been right about very much lately. Maybe they’re right about Dart.”
The Giants have been wrong about so much for so long. They were wrong about Ben McAdoo and Dave Gettleman and Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge and, well, you get the idea. They thought they were right about Daniel Jones, then decided they were wrong. Now he’s in Indianapolis and has been one of the best quarterbacks in the league through three games, which means the Giants might turn out to be dead wrong for letting him go. Even if it did look like the right thing at the time.
The grandaddy wrong of them all, of course, is Saquon Barkley, once the No. 2 pick in the draft for them, allowed to walk out the door and head down to Philadelphia and help win the Eagles a Super Bowl.
Since the last time the Giants won a Super Bowl, they have fallen down and mostly stayed down. They have become as bad as the Jets. If the Jets have been a joke franchise and a joke operation, so have the Giants. Last season, on the way to 3-14, their quarterbacks were Jones until they cut him, and Tommy (Cutlets) DeVito and Drew Lock.
On Sunday at MetLife the quarterback is Jaxson Dart. If he stays healthy — and it’s as awfully big “if” behind that offensive line — he will get his chance to show across the rest of this season that the Giants don’t need to be back in the quarterback business in next year’s draft if they end up with one of the worst records in the league, which they sure might. They could even end up No. 1, just the way they were a couple of times when Eli was still here.
Wilson gave the Giants brief but false hope against the Cowboys a couple of weeks ago, lighting the Cowboys up for more than 400 passing yards. But we now have the sense that just about anybody can do that to a Cowboys defense that is about as formidable as a glass of milk.
Then everybody saw what he looked like against the Chiefs last Sunday night, when he gave such a ridiculously bad performance in the red zone at the end you were surprised he didn’t get released on the way to the locker room. That was when Wilson apparently could only spot open receivers in the third row of the stands behind the end zone. Imagine how Jameis Winston felt watching an effort like that.
Whatever they are saying over at MetLife, this truly is a move borne out of desperation. And the Giants needing to be right about something. Truly. Schoen and Daboll were both lucky to survive last season, one of the dreariest in the 100 years of Giants football. Everybody has seen what the Giants have looked like since they did win that one playoff game against the Vikings, in one of the two winning seasons they’ve had since the last Super Bowl against the Patriots. After the Vikings, they promptly lost to the Eagles, 38-7. Not just lost but got slapped. They have been losing ever since.
Now they are where they are with Dart, who did provide some excitement and some juice during the preseason. They ask him to get the ball to Malik Nabers, as talented a wide receiver they’ve ever had, one of the very best at the position in the league. They hope to get enough defense from another of their No. 1 picks, Abdul Carter, who’s been better so far than you think. They hope that the defense can do enough and Dart can do enough that the Giants steal one off the 3-0 Chargers, maybe even catch a hot West Coast team like Jim Harbaugh’s sleeping in a 1 o’clock Eastern game.
When I pointed out to an NFL guy I know that the Giants and Jets really do have the worst NFL records since the start of the 2017 season — the Panthers are several games better than both of them — he simply texted me back with this description of New York football:
“An NFL wasteland.”
It will take more than a rookie quarterback, no matter how promising, to lead them out of that wasteland. Right now, he’s all Giants fans have. Two decades and one year after Ernie drafted Eli out of Mississippi and Eli changed everything, the Giants are profoundly desperate for Jaxson Dart to do the same. If only.
LOOK CLOSER AT YANKS RECORD, LAY OFF ARCH & JUDGING THE GREAT AL MVP DEBATE …
Wait, I thought it was the Mets who got stuck on an Up escalator.
There has never been a crazier regular season than this one.
Are there ever five consecutive minutes in one of those football pregame shows when they don’t crack each other up?
Hey:
The Yankees have obviously turned things around since the middle of August, no doubt.
And who knows, this might be the year when they finally win their first World Series since 2009 in a wide-open year like this.
But I keep reading about their record since Aug. 11, which was 28-12 through Thursday night.
And that is an absolute fact they won all those games.
So is this:
21 of those victories came against the Twins, Cardinals, Nationals, Rays, Orioles, White Sox.
What if Jalen Brunson doesn’t like playing fast?
People need to lay off Arch Manning.
John Slattery is in “The Rainmaker,” and that’s a good thing, because he’s another actor who’s good in everything.
If the Jets could actually get a game off the Dolphins on Monday night, the schedule for the next month isn’t all that bad.
You know, even for them.
I listen to Dabo Swinney and start to worry that it might be my fault that Clemson is 1-3.
I would vote for No. 99 as MVP, but I don’t see how Cal Raleigh doesn’t get it.
I think it might be a little risky this weekend having Aaron Rodgers be our ambassador to Ireland.
Man, there are a bunch of ballers on the European Ryder Cup team.
So cool to see the local kid from Sleepy Hollow, Cameron Young, come out firing the way he did on Friday afternoon and look like the best player on the property.
Especially after the morning session made the whole thing look like Bethpage Black Friday for the U.S. team.
One more golf thing?
I occasionally start reading a new book while waiting for Patrick Cantlay to putt, and that means even before he rolls in another big one.
Carlos Alcaraz rolled an ankle the other day in Tokyo and a whole sport held its breath.
The only how-to book you’re going to need this year is “Disrupt Everything – and Win,” from my friend Mr. Patterson and Patrick Leddin, on sale Tuesday.
No manager in baseball, not one, has done a better job than Mark Kotsay of the A’s.
And no executive — not one — did a better job than Matt Arnold of the Brewers.
Finally today:
I tweeted about this on Wednesday, but we lost one of our family dogs, Nellie, this week, a few months short of her 15th birthday.
We have had a lot of dogs across the lives of our children.
None was more loving than Nellie.
In a world that gets meaner by the day, she was kind and good and gentle.
If you have ever lost a pet, you know what this experience is like.
And yet for all the sadness of this — for my wife and I and the kids — you know what I’ve been doing the past few days?
Remembering Nellie running.