The Draw Play

I tuned in last week to watch the Giants play the Texas in preseason and it took 1 play for me to deeply to sigh at the state of things. In no time, after it got worse, I saw the excuses start to pop up again. Mostly “it’s his first game back after major injury”. “It’s preseason”. “He settled in and played better later”. I’m so fucking tired.

This is who Daniel Jones is. It’s who he’s always been. It is who he will always be. He’s a mediocre physical talent who can’t make every throw, can scramble, and cannot process the game fast enough to be effective at QB. This is YEAR 6. He’s not going to change. He’s a backup-caliber player at best who can occasionally play well enough to win a game.

I’ve never been a drinker of the Jones Kool-Aid and I’ve thought he was not the guy since day 1 but I’ve tried my best to be fair to him and I’ve excused him plenty. The excuses aren’t without warrant. They aren’t pure cope. He has been stuck on dogshit rosters behind dogshit offensive lines throwing to dogshit weapons in dogshit schemes for dogshit coaches for most of his dogshit career. The Giants have not done the kid any favors. He’s taken it all on the chin and gotten back up like a champ in that regard. I bear him no personal ill-will. But he just doesn’t have the juice. When he threw for touchdowns in his early years he was a turnover machine. When he fixed his turnover problem he did so by becoming a timid checkdown coward. He can’t go through his progressions. He’s injury-prone. You can’t rely on his one good skill of scrambling. He’s backup caliber. He’s not the guy. He never was, and we already ruined any chance he had.

The dark secret of QBs is it’s pretty easy to tell if a guy has the juice in the end. Every QB has good plays and bad plays. Good drives and bad drives. Good games and bad games. Good seasons and bad seasons if they are fortunate enough to play that long. What makes you a franchise guy is if the good outweighs the bad. Eli was known for dumbshit INTs but he didn’t throw them on every play, he was overall quite good at moving the ball effectively. He mostly made the right decisions, even when things went sour and that right decision was to throw it away or take a sack. That’s why he was a good quarterback. That’s why he was the guy. You don’t see a lot of players cross the juice-having line from no juice to the juice. If they do, it usually happens after a few seasons. But 6?

Daniel Jones has good moments, he has good games, he even had an alright season once and played well in a playoff win. He even did some good shit during the Texans game. But what backup QB doesn’t have good moments? Remember when we all loved Josh Dobbs for 2 weeks last year? Some good throws, some good decisions, some great moments…do not make you the guy. I swear after every Daniel Jones flop of a game I see people in the Giants fanbase writing it off as best they can like he’s still a rookie learning the ropes in week 4. After every Daniel Jones success, I still see some doofuses pointing and cheering as if it means something major flipped. The level of cope is astounding.

You could probably call me a hater but I’ve never rooted against the guy. I do not want him to be bad. I just don’t think he’s good, and I’ve run out of excuses to give him the benefit of. I ran out last year. I held onto hope that his average at best 2022 was a step in the right direction and not smoke and mirrors but that hope instantly went up in flames last year. Stop giving him excuses. Any excuse. This is fucking year 6 of the Daniel Jones experience. Even the Jets are smart enough to move on from failures at QB faster than this. It’s not a good sign to see excuses pop up in Giants forums to this day yet every single other fanbase has just been laughing at us for years now. When are we going to stop pretending that his one throw to Darius Slayton justifies 4 quarters of below-average play? Stop it! Root for him all you want, he’s the QB so we sorta have to support him and I will not root for losing. Stop trying to justify all the failure and accept this is who he is, and simply be disappointed like the rest of us who have.

My one wish for Daniel Jones this year is that he leaves it all on the table. Go down swinging. Despite this post I think most of the fanbase has turned on him by now and wants him gone. I don’t care if he becomes turnover Jones again if he’s chucking deep underthrown bombs towards Nabers every drive. If I’m stuck with Daniel Jones for one more season, I want it to at least be entertaining. This isn’t the time to play it safe and most of us have moved on. At least make it fun if you can’t make it good.

Man, not even week 1 and I’m in mid-season depression form already. GET HYPE

 

 

I’m convinced Sam Darnold is going to drop 30 on us in week 1 and my soul will leave my body.