Giants again see glimpse into future as Jaxson Dart impresses in preseason finale
Starting was “normal” for Jaxson Dart. It’s what he has been doing since high school. So while heading out to take the first offensive snap and play the first quarter of Thursday’s preseason finale — his debut in that role in the NFL — should have been a momentous occasion for him, it instead felt like the most routine thing he did in this summer we all turned Darty.
He certainly aced the test put in front of him in this game with as much ease and moxie as he has most of the challenges of this still-nascent campaign.
Dart found a wide-open Gunner Olszewski for a 50-yard reception on the second play of the game, then capped that five-play drive with a 7-yard touchdown pass to tight end Greg Dulcich. He finished the night completing 6 of 12 passes (five of the incompletions were on drops) for 81 yards and a touchdown.
In his three preseason games, he was 32-for-47 (68.1%) for 372 yards with three touchdowns and zero interceptions. He also had six rushes for 52 yards with a touchdown.
But now comes the hard part.
Not starting. Stopping.
With the preseason complete, Dart will revert to one of the backups behind Russell Wilson. When Sept. 7 rolls around and the Giants face the Commanders in a regular-season game, Dart will be on the sideline.
We barely had a chance to say hello to him, and it’s already time to say goodbye.
It will be a perspective he has never had.
“I’ve never in my career come off the bench,” he said after the Giants’ 42-10 win. “I feel like whenever my number is called, I’m going to go out there and play my game and ball. That’s my mindset any time I touch the field. Obviously, Russ is the starter and he is going to be amazing . . . My job is to be the best teammate and be ready whenever it is.”
Whenever he gets a chance to be back in the action, he means.
It’s unclear how the Giants plan to specifically deploy Dart as the team begins focusing on its opener. He could be relegated to the third emergency quarterback role, essentially inactive. Or he could be the active second-stringer with, perhaps, a slate of plays that Brian Daboll can spring on a defense at any given moment.
There is even a chance that the Giants will have three active quarterbacks for their games — Wilson, Dart and Jameis Winston — although that would come with some risk of being caught shorthanded at another position.
The Giants probably don’t even know how this will all look in two weeks’ time.
“We’re on kind of a day-to-day plan with the young quarterback,” Daboll said. “Every day we are learning something.”
There were some lessons on Thursday night. The most pressing came on Dart’s final play, which ended his preseason with a bit of a scare. He converted a fourth-and-4 with a 23-yard scramble and appeared to fumble at the end of the run, but that turnover was negated by a Patriots penalty. Then the officials took Dart off the field to be checked for a concussion; he had stayed down for a moment with the wind knocked out of him.
Winston came on to throw a 30-yard touchdown pass to Jalin Hyatt on his first snap for a 14-0 lead while Dart was in the blue medical tent on the sideline.
Dart cleared the concussion protocol and remained in the bench area but did not return. Daboll said the plan going into the game was to play him for only one quarter anyway.
While friend and fourth-stringer Tommy DeVito (who threw three touchdown passes in the second half) lectured Dart on needing to slide and the Amazon Prime broadcast grabbed a quick interview with Dart’s mother urging him to duck such hits, Dart and Daboll didn’t seem bothered by the aggressive nature of the run.
Dart said he thought he could split the two defenders who wound up tackling him and scored a touchdown, and while he regretted the would-be fumble, he was not remorseful about not sliding. Daboll said afterward that in “this particular game” it would “probably” have been a good idea to slide, but he also emphasized that he did not want to “coach it out of him.”
Maybe that was a lesson for us, not them. This is who they want Dart to be. Sorry, Mom.
There also was the opening coin toss. Daboll tapped Dart and fellow first-round pick Abdul Carter to be the game captains shortly before kickoff and gave Dart the list of choices and contingencies for when the decisions needed to be made. That more than any defense or opponent this season befuddled Dart, who said he didn’t participate in such ceremonies in college because he was always busy warming up.
“He came up to me and was like, ‘What do you want me to do again? I’ve never done this before,’ ” Daboll said of Dart’s brief panic. “We just try to do things that may come up with him one day. We’ll keep on building him. Being a rookie quarterback is not easy, being a quarterback is not easy. He knows he has a lot of things to work on, but he’s made progress every day and I’m glad we drafted him. I’m glad he’s our guy.”
So now we wait and see when their guy becomes their starter again and for real.
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.
