Blue puts hope in Cal QB for future
The Giants’ third-round selection of Cal quarterback Davis Webb on Friday night opened a new, irresistible chapter in New York sports, and not just because they drafted this 6-foot-5 football junkie with a live arm to be Eli Manning’s heir.
It’s because the last time Webb was in New York, guess what he was doing?
“It was a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Jets,” Webb, 22, said via conference call from his home in Prosper, Texas, on Friday night. “So that was the last time I was in that area.”
That’s right: the young man the Giants drafted to be the face of their franchise in a few years, to carry the mantle of the two-time Super Bowl winner Manning into the future, was a player the perennially quarterback-starved Jets showed interest in and passed over for three rounds.
Giants coach Ben McAdoo, by contrast, hadn’t even met Webb prior to drafting him at 87th overall.
Giants’ vice president of player evaluation Marc Ross and team scouts had graded Webb so high that they saw no chance of Webb falling to Big Blue this far, also past teams such as the Saints and Cardinals who entered with the similar luxury of time the next few years to groom a successor behind a veteran incumbent.
“Frankly, I try and put Ben in touch with guys that I think we really have a chance to get,” Ross said Friday night. “I did not think at this point Davis would be one of those players.”
Clearly, the Giants didn’t want to draft their quarterback in the first two rounds, either, preferring to address immediate needs at tight end and defensive tackle. And so they didn’t think they would get Webb. But then there he was still on the board in the third, and they were glad to take him off the rest of the league’s hands, feeling as if they’d gotten ideal value and their preferred player.
“You saw what happened in the first round, teams trading up everything to get those (quarterbacks),” Ross said, referring to Chicago (Mitchell Trubisky), Kansas City (Patrick Mahomes) and Houston (Deshaun Watson) paying steep prices to move up. “We feel we have a fairly equal talent at the bottom of the third compared to some of the guys that went pretty high.”
McAdoo, of course, once coached another Cal quarterback who fell in a draft, Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay, and saw the value of the 2005 24th overall pick sitting his first three seasons behind incumbent Brett Favre.
“It’s a benefit to be able to sit behind especially a veteran quarterback and learn,” McAdoo said. “It goes a long way.”
And the Giants’ second-year coach, a football nut himself, clearly is psyched about Webb’s “gym rat” quality, a student of the game whose father is head coach at Frisco Centennial in Dallas.
Webb, already polished as a monotone, cliché-heavy, neutralsounding quarterback in the glare of the spotlight, played down any disappointment on Friday about sliding into the third round.
“Yeah, the NFL Draft is a little weird,” is the most he would say.
But McAdoo also seemed charged about Webb having a “chip on his shoulder” from having lost his job at Texas Tech to Mahomes and now seeing his name slip down the draft board.
It always made sense this year, too, for the Giants to go get their quarterback of the future if they felt he was in this class. And they went about it the right way Friday night, too.
The Giants said they reached out to Manning in some fashion to alert him that they were drafting a QB, obviously a sensitive issue with three years left on his contract. Then Reese, wary of the legs this story will gain quickly, made it a point to clarify his stance.
“Let me get this straight guys,” Reese said. “We hope that Eli plays for a long time for us. Eli is our quarterback and we still think that he can play at a high level, but we do know that he is not going to play forever, so we are trying to make the best decision as we move forward for the rest of Eli’s career.”
The gravity of this pick was not lost on anyone, though.
Excluding the 2004 draft year, when the Giants selected Philip Rivers fourth overall out of North Carolina State and traded him to the Chargers for the first overall pick Manning, Webb is the highest Giants quarterback taken since Jeff Hostetler (59th overall, third round) in 1984 out of West Virginia.
The Giants like him because Reese said they feel he has “the best arm in the draft this year,” he loves football, he’s tall and athletic for his size. Ross admitted that the offenses Webb ran in college and his struggles with accuracy, especially deep, probably deterred teams.
The Giants, though, have the luxury of time to develop him, and so their fans have to be excited. Jets fans, on the other hand, have to hope at the end of all of this, they don’t become the story’s punchline.