It's time for Jaxson Dart to play for the Giants
Jaxson Dart of the New York Giants walks off the field after Sunday's game against the Kansas City Chiefs at MetLife Stadium. Credit: Jim McIsaac
As Jaxson Dart stood in front of his locker late Sunday night answering one of the more awkward question-to-actual-snap ratios in recent Giants history, having to practically apologize for the sin of being a popular alternative to the clearly unsustainable status quo, he uttered a number of mouths-of-babes truths.
“I like being on the field,” he said at one point.
The fans in the stands who had been chanting his name seemed to like it too.
To another query he said: “You get really excited when you are on the field and then you have to calm back down when you are on the sideline.”
Yeah, Giants fans can relate to that, too. They swelled and crashed each time the rookie quarterback yo-yoed between the bench and the huddle.
“It’s definitely different,” Dart said of his role through the first three winless games.
That it is, Jaxson. That it is.
The Giants have a quarterback controversy. Technically, they have had one since the spring when despite signing a pair of veterans to fill the position this season they traded up and selected Dart in the first round of the draft. Now, though, at 0-3, the conflict is reaching its crescendo.
Unlike Dart’s replies in his postgame interview, there are no easy answers.
This is a man-made crisis, a self-inflicted turmoil that could easily have been avoided by Brian Daboll. He didn’t have to elevate Dart to the backup role to start the season, he didn’t have to start sprinkling Dart onto the field like spicy, enticing red pepper pieces on a slice of pizza. If he wanted to stick to that so-called plan to let Dart sit and watch and learn for the whole year — like Patrick Mahomes did — he should have just left him as the third-stringer and stashed him properly.
But he didn’t do that. And now that Russell Wilson has made it very clear what he is and is not capable of doing, Daboll is stuck. He was hoping Wilson would buy him some time to get Dart fully prepared to take over. All he got was less than a month.
The Giants can start Wilson on Sunday against the Chargers if they like, but they need to be prepared to yank him fast if (when) things even hint at going sideways the way they did in this game against Kansas City.
It’s time for Dart to start playing. Actually playing. Not just three snaps a game, not just read-option gimmicks. Give him a series or two. Allow him to throw a pass (although there was one called on Sunday night that Dart wisely kept and scrambled with for a short gain). Let’s see what the kid can actually do.
This whole mess is clearly getting to Wilson, too. He talks about having a thick skin, and he’s certainly been booed before . . . though likely never in his first game in front of his new home fans. But when he tried to run for a first down after keeping a read-option with Cam Skattebo on a key third down in the fourth quarter just after Dart had exited the field and the crowd groaned its disappointment, it looked more like Wilson was trying to prove he could keep up with the younger Dart than trying to get the first down. He wound up accomplishing neither, by the way.
Wilson certainly was aware that while he addressed the media on a riser in front of cameras in a sparsely populated separate room reserved for the starting quarterback, most of the media remained in the locker room to await Dart’s remarks. That’s where the story was. That’s where it will continue to be.
As loud and as obvious as the Giants fans at MetLife Stadium on Sunday night were regarding their pick to play quarterback, the chants of “We Want Dart” echoing into the microphones that fed the sound to a national television audience, it could have been much worse. The team was “lucky” nearly half the stands were packed with Kansas City fans who really had no rooting interest in the Giants’ quarterbacking quandaries. This Sunday, when the Giants host the Chargers for a 1 p.m. kickoff, the building will be packed with pitchfork-toting Giants faithful who will want to see Dart in an extended role.
The customer isn’t always right, and fans have a very different perspective on things than coaches and executives and even other players have from inside the building. But someone in the organization needs to start reading the very big room they have built in East Rutherford and recognize that there is little financial and no emotional investment in Wilson. He’s already a quarterback of the past.
Dart is the future and the future needs to be now.
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.
