Jones knows he has to be better. He knows the Giants would have moved up in the draft to select quarterback Drake Maye if the New England Patriots hadn’t tried to empty the Giants’ draft pick vault.
Jones isn’t happy about that. He doesn’t have to be. He shouldn’t be. In his heart, though, he has to know if he were in Schoen’s shoes he would have been considering the same move. Jones’ play in 2023 was atrocious, befitting of a rookie cutting his NFL teeth for a bad team rather than a fifth-year veteran on the second year of a moderately large multi-year contract.
Jones knows that if he isn’t better, at least as good as he was in 2022 and perhaps better than he’s ever been considering the effort the Giants have made to upgrade his receivers and his offensive line, he won’t be the quarterback in 2025.
Jones also should know, and probably does, that no matter how good he is individually he won’t finish the season as the team’s starting quarterback if he and his teammates don’t win enough games to be within realistic range of a playoff berth come the last quarter of the season. The fact that $23 million of his 2025 salary is guaranteed for injury guarantees that if the Giants are going nowhere this season — and know it — Jones won’t be playing.
Can Jones be better?
Every Giants fan with an ‘X’ account wants to analyze (over-analyze?) every spring or summer practice, every good or bad throw, every word the guy says, and whether his decision to keep or shave his scruffy-looking beard is the right choice.
The thing is, none of it matters. What matters is that coming off a torn ACL just nine months ago, Jones has been able to work every day without limitations. He has moved well and without hesitation.
What matters with Jones is what we see beginning Sept. 8 against the Minnesota Vikings. Can Jones take advantage of what should be the improved weaponry around him? Can he step up in an offense that is now quarterback-centric and not running back-centric?
Can we see something we haven’t seen from Jones since Joe Judge and Jason Garrett more or less brow-beat risk-taking out of his game? That is the willingness and ability he showed under Pat Shurmur during the early part of his career to push the ball down the field. Brian Daboll has demanded it all summer, and Jones has often delivered. He isn’t Josh Allen, but for those of you old enough to appreciate the reference he isn’t the soft-tossing Norm Snead, either. Can Jones combine downfield aggression with something akin to the clean football he played in 2022 when he led the league with a career-best 1.1% interception rate?
Schoen and Daboll know they need to be better, too. They know what the guy who signs their checks, co-owner John Mara, wants.“I expect us to take a big step forward,” Mara said at the beginning of training camp. “It’s hard to articulate my expectations. I obviously want to show significant improvement over last year. But I’m not going to make any specific guarantees or demands or anything like that. But they know what I want to see.”
I do not believe Schoen and Daboll are, or should be, on the hot seat. Others disagree, I know. The GM and coach have had one good season and one bad one, albeit in the opposite order of what one might like to see to show progress toward becoming the legitimate, consistent contender the Giants are trying to build.
Mara and Steve Tisch have gotten rid of Ben McAdoo, Pat Shurmur, and Judge since they pushed Tom Coughlin out a door he did not want to walk through after the 2015 season. They are on their third general manager, having decided Jerry Reese was no longer up to the job and realized that Dave Gettleman was only making a bad situation worse.
I do not believe Mara and Tisch have an appetite for starting over — again. They did not want to quit on Judge. The coach forced their hand by embarrassing the franchise, blatantly showing he had no faith in his own team and giving a rambling, non-sensical 11-minute answer to a question that made it obvious he was in over his head as an NFL head coach.
The Giants crave the stability they haven’t had since Coughlin. They want Schoen and Daboll, the outsiders they finally turned to after Judge crashed and burned in 2021, to succeed. There are, in my view, signs that they can.
Ty Dunne of the fantastic subscription site GoLongTD.com, wrote an expose a few years ago detailing just how broken the Giants had become internally. Recently, Dunne wrote a three-part series on the Giants showing just how much things have changed inside the walls at 1925 Giants Drive.
As Dunne pointed out, Schoen had to reset both the roster and the front office. He also had to clean up the salary cap to get to a point where he could begin to chase real talent. Oh, and he had to get enough buy-in from an ownership group accused of being too involved in football decisions to be given the time, and the rope, to implement his vision of what he wanted the Giants to be.
Leave a Reply