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Jordan Raanan, ESPN Staff Writer
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — There was a play Daniel Jones made in his first career start that had the New York Giants, and most of their fans, convinced this was their next great quarterback. It came in the third quarter of a thrilling come-from-behind Week 3 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 2019 season.
Jones, the No. 6 overall pick earlier that year, was under pressure off the edge to his right. He slid effortlessly in the pocket to his left, scanned the field and fired an off-platform bomb across his body 42.5 yards in the air. It was such a tough throw that it had just a 37% chance of completion, according to NFL Next Gen Stats.
But this particular throw was a thing of beauty, with the ball flying from the left hash mark deep downfield to the right hash, over safety Mike Edwards and away from cornerback Vernon Hargreaves III. It landed in the hands of rookie receiver Darius Slayton in stride for a jaw-dropping 46-yard gain just short of the end zone.
The Giants would score moments later on a touchdown pass from Jones to Sterling Shepard. But it’s that throw to Slayton that still resonates just over five years later, not because of its importance in that game, but because it’s puzzlingly no longer part of Jones’ arsenal. He had 35 tight-window completions in 12 starts as a rookie. That number has decreased in every season since.
That previous version of Jones has disappeared. The young and promising rookie who threw the ball downfield with regularity and little regard for repercussions — throwing 24 touchdown passes his rookie season and nothing close in any years since, the most being 15 in 2022 — barely exists anymore, making an appearance only on the rarest of occasions, such as Week 2 last year against the Cardinals when he opened it up and aired it out on multiple occasions to the speedy Jalin Hyatt as the Giants rallied for a 31-28 win.
The hour appears to be getting late for Jones and the Giants. He is in his sixth season as the starter and needs to locate the right balance of that rookie year gunslinger and his more conservative current form. The coming weeks, beginning with Thursday’s game with the NFC East rival Dallas Cowboys (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video), are all about finding out where that quarterback who zipped that ball to Slayton in Tampa Bay has gone — and whether he can resurface.
THIS DANIEL JONES is bigger, stronger than the 2019 version — but has more calluses. He’s not anywhere near as aggressive as his younger self.
“It’s still in D.J. and I think that there are times where you still see flashes of that,” Slayton said. “But we spent two years of [Giants coaches] trying just to play defense and [the offense] not make mistakes.”
Jones averaged 7.8 air yards per attempt as a rookie in coach Pat Shurmur’s offense. That is down to 6.7 air yards per attempt from 2020 until now. Even in his best season in 2022, Jones was at 6.0 air yards per attempt, 33rd out of 33 qualifying quarterbacks. He’s at 6.2 this season.
The turnovers have certainly decreased (1.8 per game in his first two professional seasons to 0.9 per game since) as a result — but so have the splash plays.
“You don’t want to lose that gunslinger mentality,” Jones said. “I think you want to understand when those opportunities are there and when to take them. And you’re always kind of trying to balance that.”
Jones’ future is uncertain. The Giants made that abundantly clear this offseason when they tried to trade up in the draft for his replacement.
“This is the year for Daniel,” general manager Joe Schoen said on “Hard Knocks” this summer. “Plan all along was [to] give him a couple years. Is he our guy for the next 10 years? Or do we need to pivot and find somebody else?”
Jones struggled in the opener but has bounced back with two strong performances against the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Browns. His QBR through three weeks is 52.7, which ranks him 16th of 31 qualifying quarterbacks. He didn’t attempt a throw of 20-plus air yards in the opener, and is 1 of 8 this season for 28 yards. That one completion was when rookie receiver Malik Nabers wrestled the ball from the hands and off the head of a Browns cornerback in Week 3.
Now it’s time to test where they are against a Dallas Cowboys team that beat them 40-0 last year in Week 1 at MetLife Stadium.
“I’ve played more, seen more, studied and improved,” Jones said. “Obviously, didn’t go great last time, but we’re confident, it’s a new team. We’re a new team, they’re a new team, and we’re excited for the opportunity.”
THE GIANTS FIRED Shurmur and replaced him in 2020 with Joe Judge, who brought along former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett to be his coordinator. That lasted until Garrett was fired midway through the 2021 season, replaced by former Browns coach Freddie Kitchens.
They finished a combined 10-23 in the 2020 and 2021 seasons. The offense and Jones struggled. That regime tried so hard to shake the turnovers out of Jones that Slayton believed it caused irreparable damage.
“Every day somebody’s telling you, ‘Hey, don’t turn it over. Don’t turn it over, don’t turn it over, don’t turn it over,'” Slayton said. “You’re just going to go out there and try not to turn the ball over. … It’s like if they’re trying to preach a certain way of playing, you conform to that. It’s just natural.”
Jones’ aggressiveness seemed to flip to the opposite end of the spectrum during Judge’s tenure, when he became super conservative. The pounding of prudence into his psyche wasn’t the only contributing factor.
Owner John Mara conceded when he hired general manager Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll in 2022 that the Giants had already done everything possible to “screw this kid up.” The kid being Jones. The constant changing of coaches, offensive coordinators, pairing him with a bad offensive line and no true No. 1 receiver, Mara said the Giants had done it all.
Jones was shell-shocked. He has been sacked 187 times since entering the league in 2019, third most in that span. The more hits he takes, the harder it becomes to hang in the pocket with confidence. That lack of confidence leads to his eyes dropping. It speeds up his reads or, worse, he doesn’t get through them at all, even when there is time. He settles too quickly for the checkdown. These can all be fallouts of the situation, according to an offensive coach familiar with Jones.
JONES’ FUTURE HINGES directly on how he performs this season. He’s due $30 million next year, but the Giants can get out of the deal with a manageable $22 million in dead money.
His contract has a reasonable escape clause after this year, just in case. It’s going to take a miraculous remainder of the season for the Giants to want to run it back … again.
They need to see Jones play better than he did in 2022, which earned him the four-year, $160 million deal. He threw 15 touchdown passes and five interceptions that year, while running for another seven scores. The Giants signed Jones with the intention he could improve on that and become a top 5-caliber quarterback, with hope he could turn into a 30-plus touchdown guy. That is what the team needs to see, or some version of it, for him to be the long-term answer at quarterback.
“The upside, I’ve got a lot of belief in our staff and Daniel’s work ethic and [Daboll and Jones’] relationship that will continue to grow, and Daniel will continue to get better,” Schoen said after signing Jones.”If he’s just at his floor right now, I’m really excited about what his ceiling is going to be.”
The perception of Jones around the league appears significantly different than an improved vision.
“Maybe a bridge starter,” one NFL general manager said of his value as a free agent if the Giants cut him after the season. “It’s a situation probably where he’s competing to start.”
The $30 million he’s owed next season is a “relative bargain” if he’s a quality starter, the executive said. That makes drafting a quarterback and keeping Jones a possibility.
“They weren’t shy about drafting [a quarterback to compete with Jones] this year,” the executive said. “So why would that change?”
It probably wouldn’t as long as Jones continued to play well. The Giants insist his confidence is not a problem. The quarterback has said the same. The results the past two weeks on the road against Washington and Cleveland seem to back up his belief.
Daboll spoke last week about a study he commissioned from his analytics team on throwing the ball 20-plus yards downfield. Winning teams have done it 3.5 times per game early this season, they concluded. The Giants threw four deep passes against the Commanders and four this past week against the Browns after zero in Week 1.
Maybe they are moving in the right direction. The Giants spent all spring and summer putting an emphasis on getting the ball downfield. Their quarterback is getting this new message drilled into his head.
“You always want to take your shots when you have them,” Jones said. “Certainly looking to do that when I can.”
Daboll’s reputation is as a quarterback guru. He’s running the offense this season and now has three games as playcaller with Jones under his belt. Daboll is calling the “shot” plays and expects his quarterback to take them.
“Certainly, if he has the right look, I think he’ll throw it,” Daboll said.
Jones has done that the past two weeks, even if it’s without much success. Some of that has to do with the opposing defenses. The Giants have faced the sixth-most passing snaps against Cover 2 defense at 18.5%. Cover 2 defense protects the back end of the field with two deep safeties and begs the quarterback to choose underneath or intermediate routes.
Jones is looking downfield only to see the safeties deep. In Week 1, he panicked when it wasn’t there, hesitated and showed too much indecision. Daboll noted after Week 2 Jones was more decisive with his reads. It remains a work in progress after what he has been through the past five years.
All this could make it that much harder to imagine Jones recapturing the aggressiveness of his 2019 rookie self. Or even a more improved version in New York.
“If you were going to driver’s ed and they just showed videos of fatal car crashes,” one NFL assistant said, “you’d probably be a cautious driver too.”