Jones out to prove doubters wrong by using as few words as possible
Comeback victory suggests Giants may have found their next great quarterback
Some people looked at Daniel Jones and saw a nondescript kid with a square haircut, a hank of side-comb running across his forehead in a straight line, and decided he was terminally unremarkable. The New York Giants saw something else beneath that flap of hair. They saw smarts and a chin that would break a fist.
Up close, you notice more subtle things about Jones. The lack of personal vanity that shows itself in a rumpled shirt. A level-headedness so pronounced that receiver Sterling Shepard said that “not once” has the rookie quarterback done anything silly or immature.
These all happen to be vital qualities for any athlete who wants to try to play under New York’s Klieg lights, much less succeed a legend in Eli Manning.
“He’s not an excuse-maker. He’s stoic in his outlook and he just keeps coming at you,” said Jay Bilas, a longtime friend who coached Jones in youth basketball in Charlotte, N.C.
Jones has been an NFL starter for only a week, but that’s long enough for one of the great told-you-sos in NFL annals. The hoots when the Giants drafted Jones sixth overall still hum in the inner ears. Let’s review, just for fun. “Blue Clueless” a New York Post headline blared. “You have got to be kidding me,” Stephen A. Smith tweeted.
Then there were Jones’s competitors. The passed-over Dwayne Haskins said, “The NFL done messed up.” The Cleveland Browns’ Baker Mayfield told GQ Magazine he “cannot believe” the Giants drafted Jones because he wasn’t a “winner.”
Just try getting Jones to respond with a brag after leading the Giants to that epochal victory over Tampa Bay last week in his first start, the second-largest comeback (18 points) by a rookie quarterback in NFL history. Try shaking him out of his habitual, implacable steady state. Can’t do it.
“I’m just trying to keep it going, stack a few wins together,” he said equably after practice Wednesday.
It was, as coach Pat Shurmur pointed out, just “a one-game sample size.” But there was something in the quality of that victory that suggests the Giants may have found their next great quarterback.
Trying to draft an answer at quarterback, a long-term face of the franchise, is the most precarious, job-threatening, trap-door task in the NFL. It’s a metric-defying mystery why some slight-chested guy turns out to be great, while the head-turner built like a fountain statue fizzles. It’s therefore worth exploring just what the Giants saw in Jones, while others shrugged and pegged him a low-rounder.
Start with the discerning eye of Shurmur, who has been on eight playoff staffs, so he knows quality. And that of general manager Dave Gettleman, a deeply experienced pro scout who started with the Buffalo Bills in 1986, and was sitting at the elbow of the legendary Ernie Accorsi on the day when Accorsi controversially traded for Eli Manning 15 years ago. If there was one thing both men understood about drafting a quarterback, it was that you don’t risk a high pick on a player who had one wondrous season.
What gave them the certainty to seize Jones at No. 6 was three seasons of evidence, reams of film from 36 straight starts at Duke in a pro-style offence, during which Jones consistently showed some unmistakable traits: leggy six-footfive athleticism, pro-calibre reads and the ability to complete throws accurately while under pressure.
There was a something else too: an underlying tenacity. Bilas saw it when Jones was the AAU basketball teammate of Grant Williams, the future first-round NBA draft pick of the Boston Celtics.
“Grant was the most talented player, but Daniel was the best all-around player we had and the toughest,” Bilas said.
Jones attended Bilas’s annual camps every summer and in his junior year he showed up with a cast on his broken right wrist. Bilas thought Jones had just come to watch, but Jones said, “No, I’m playing,” and took the court.
“Left-handed, he was the best player in camp,” Bilas said.
He was an unassuming, coachable kid, “quiet, not demonstrative.” Bilas had to threaten to bench him to get him to be more aggressive with the ball and drive one-on-one to the basket. Bilas told him, “If you don’t get a charge called on you, you’re coming out. I want you to knock a guy down. Go run somebody’s ass over and don’t help them up.”
Jones just nodded at him with spaniel eyes and then went out and drove straight inside on two consecutive plays, “guys bouncing off him.” He made the shots and drew fouls.
“He doesn’t just come ready to play; he comes ready to fight,” Bilas said. “If you put him in a room with a bunch of competitors and only one guy can come out? I’d bet on him.”
The film at Duke showed the same thing. Washington Redskins coach Jay Gruden this week articulated what everyone now recognizes: Jones’s middling collegiate career at Duke was actually a triumph of competitiveness over awfulness. His receivers dropped nine per cent of his passes, the second highest rate of any quarterback in his class. He was constantly in danger of being overwhelmed with an offensive line that ranked among the worst in major college football.
“He took a lot of shots; they were outmatched a lot of times,” Gruden said. But Jones stood in “and did some really good things, showed his accuracy, toughness and athletic ability.”
Like all rookie quarterbacks, naturally, Jones will have his reversals and bad days. One might even come this week against the win-starved Redskins. But it seems increasingly apparent that the much-mocked Giants properly valued this interesting, self-contained young player, who radiates such stillness, but also promise. In fact, Jones may have shown everybody who he really is way back on Aug. 20, before he ever took the field. That was the day Mayfield’s comments went public. Jones was asked how he’d respond if they met face to face on a field.
Jones just said calmly: “I’d make sure we won the game.”
He comes ready to fight. If you put him in a room with a bunch of competitors and only one guy can come out? I’d bet on him.