Giants can't afford to let the fire in Jaxson Dart go out
Mykel Williams and Sam Okuayinonu of the San Francisco 49ers force an incomplete pass during the fourth quarter against Jaxson Dart of the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Jaxson Dart is getting beaten up, and it’s not the hits from opposing defenses that are doing it.
Sure, he keeps taking jaw-rattlers during the games, and on Sunday against the 49ers, there were more than a few that had to sting. He was sacked from behind in the first half, lowered his shoulder on a run for a first down late in the game and took one right under the chin on a short gain in the third quarter that drew a penalty against the defense for making contact with his head.
Those he keeps popping up from, though. He even managed to hang on to the football on that thunderous sack by Clelin Ferrell at the Giants' 5 in the second quarter that everyone in the stadium except him saw coming.
“Strong hands,” Dart said with a rare smile.
No, the Niners couldn’t get to him. They couldn’t make him blink or hesitate or even wince.
These days, only the Giants do that.
As the game ended with a 34-24 loss — the third straight for the Giants, their seventh of the season and their fourth since Dart took over as starting quarterback — the rookie walked out onto the field, unraveled the tape around his wrists, rolled his eyes up toward the rapidly darkening standard-time sky and sighed.
Asked how Dart was doing shortly after he left the locker room, coach Brian Daboll said he had checked and was told he was “good.”
Then he realized that wasn’t the right answer. Not the whole one, anyway.
“Not good, though,” Daboll quickly added.
Physically, Dart was fine. Emotionally? Psychologically? Far from it.
“He's a competitor,” Daboll said. “So when you get these results, it should frustrate you. It should have you, for lack of better terms, not happy.”
That’s where Dart is these days. The youngest starting quarterback in the league is tearing it up and playing better than just about anyone could have expected. In this game, he threw for 191 yards and two touchdowns without a turnover, ran for a team-high 56 yards with another score . . . and it wasn’t even close to enough to give the Giants a win.
They scored on their opening drive, and the Niners were in control during just about every minute of play after that.
“It’s not fun to lose,” Dart said. “I have all the confidence in the world each and every week . . . But there are certain plays we have to make.”
Dart is. The rest of the Giants are not.
The Giants find themselves in dangerous times. They are 2-7 for the third straight season, and in each of the previous two, things never got much better. But worse than losing games, and possibly losing jobs as the coming months progress, the organization must be wary about losing the one piece it has going for it right now.
It cannot lose Dart. It cannot abide a fracture in his confidence or a fissure in his psyche.
It cannot allow him to become inured to losing the way so many others in recent years have been pounded into submission.
“No, not Jaxson,” Daboll said vehemently last week when asked about the threat of the quarterback losing his hatred of losing.
This is all new for Dart, though. Not the playing in the NFL, but the losing. He hadn’t even lost consecutive games since his first season at Ole Miss in 2022, when they dropped their last four.
At some point, the weight of all these failures starts to become too big a load for anyone to carry.
We aren’t there yet. Clearly. Dart was as feisty in the final minutes of a foregone game on Sunday as he was at the start of it. His final two plays of the game were a headlong 10-yard scramble for a first down on third-and-10 and a 24-yard touchdown pass to Gunner Olszewski (moments after Darius Slayton couldn't hold on to a potential 34-yard touchdown pass).
“He doesn’t take losing lightly,” Wan’Dale Robinson said. “I love him for that. You don’t want a quarterback who is OK with losing. He wants to do everything he can to get this thing back on track . . . You can hear the way he talks after games, the way he wants it so bad. Whenever you see him after a game, after a loss, you know that he doesn’t like losing.”
The rest of the team needs some more of that. A lot more of it.
“Jaxson is the leader of our football team,” Daboll said. “I know he's a rookie and that's a hard thing to do as a rookie. But the way he competes, people need to feed off of that.”
Dart sees it that way, too.
“We've got to be able to not just let things collapse,” he said of the team. “Good plays are going to happen for the other team, that’s just the league that we play in, and we can't let one lead to another. I think that's just something we need to get better at. Like, we have to have the intensity, the focus as a whole team to weather the adversity storms and always just keep the belief that we're going to win.”
So the anger in Dart stews. The frustrations smolder. In lieu of winning, that’s about as much as the Giants can ask from him.
It’s when he starts to shrug off days like Sunday, when they stop eating at him from the inside, that the Giants will know they have spoiled the one really positive aspect that this season has wrought.
When the coach is asked after a future loss how Dart is doing and he just says “good” and leaves it at that, it’ll be time to recognize just how bad it’s gotten.
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.
