The Daniel Jones Enigma
Photo by Robert Deutsch
On Sunday, the one-loss New York Giants stroll into TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville as three-point underdogs to the 2-4 Jaguars. Taken at face value, innumerous oddities appear in this sentence alone. The Giants, 14-35 in the three prior seasons, are 5-1. They are also plus three against teams with three or less in the win column.
In a strange season, finding teams with a weirder start than these two is not easy. The Giants have won four of their five games by five points or less, and the other was against the Bears. The Jaguars destroyed the formidable Chargers in week three by four touchdowns, only to lose to the Texans and Colts back-to-back.
At the forefront of this peculiar game, and suddenly prolific Giants team, is Daniel Jones, an enigma at quarterback. Is Jones the Giant’s savior to the tune of an unexpected playoff berth? Is the Giants unpredictable success saving the job of a mediocrity? What is the former top ten pick from Duke? Short answer – it’s hard to say.
In his collegiate and professional career, Jones has never consistently won games or exploded the stat book with production. And yet, he’s always held his job. In his 36 starts at Duke, Jones won just 47 percent of his game and completed under 60 percent of his passes. His rushing was notable, 1300 yards in three seasons, but only 3.3 yards per attempt. He averaged just under 1.5 touchdowns per game and one interception. Wonderfully middle-of-the-pack. While this also reflects the subpar talent around him, he won the last two Blue Devil bowl games, and the team won 29 percent of their games in the three post-Danny seasons, Jones professional career has prolonged the mundanity, simply on a bigger stage.
After the Giants took Jones number six overall in 2019. His first year was promising in statistics and lacking in wins, often the case for rookie quarterbacks. In 12 starts, despite only three wins, Jones tossed 24 touchdowns to 12 interceptions, by far the best ratio of his short career. He finished 18th in QBR– promising.
Ever since, Jones has performed below-average. The 2020 Giants had their season end in week two, when all-world running back Saquon Barkley tore his ACL. With a lackluster skills corps, Jones threw 11 touchdowns to 10 picks in 14 games and finished 20th in QBR. In 2021, little improvement was shown with Barkley performing below-his-peak, coming back from injury. Less than a touchdown per game once more and 22nd in QBR. Despite his underappreciated running game, Jones hardly throws the ball downfield. He has never averaged more than 7 yards per attempt in any season.
Not so much great stuff to look at here… (from pro football reference)
So we arrive in 2022, with the Giants ready to fight for 6-1, and Jones looking to throw his sixth touchdown pass. At the end of the first trimester, Jones is showing improvement on the margins: 67 percent completion is the highest of his career and 1.3 percent interception rate the lowest. But nothing significant enough to move him to a higher echelon of quarterback. Even with a 5-1 start, Jones still has not yet won 40 percent of his NFL starts. Although, somewhat curiously, since 2019 in the games Jones has missed to injury or tanking inactives, the Giants have won just 17 percent of those 12 games. Often, the division between subpar quarterback play and subpar surrounding talent is finicky and difficult to discern.
When perusing the 2019 draft in retrospect, beyond the fun times of Gardner Minshew Mania, Jones has performed as the second best quarterback in that draft class, behind number one overall pick Kyler Murray. Four years into his career, the answer to ‘what is Daniel Jones?’ is just not yet clear. As the eternal underdog Giants fight their way through the rest of their season, the player with the most on the line is Jones. He enters a crossroads, with one path leading to a giant contract (no pun intended) and the other a backup job somewhere else. We’ll have to see.
